Jane Bowles

Jane Bowles (born Jane Stajer Auer; February 22, 1917 – May 4, 1973) was an American writer and playwright.

Jane Auer was born in New York City in 1917. At a private high school in Massachusetts she fell from a horse. She injured her knee and was lame for the rest of her life.

She married composer Paul Bowles in 1938. Their marriage was unusual because she was lesbian and he was bisexual. They travelled in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, but settled in Tangier, Morocco in 1948.

Her only novel, Two Serious Ladies, came out in 1943. It gave her husband the idea to start writing fiction himself. She wrote short stories and her play, In the Summer House, was printed in Best Plays of 1953–1954.

At age forty, in 1957, she had a stroke. Her physical and mental health began to get worse. In 1968 she moved to Málaga, Spain and stayed in a number of psychiatric hospitals. 

Bowles died on May 4, 1973. She is buried at Cementerio de San Miguel in Málaga.

Books

Two Serious Ladies (1943)
Plain Pleasures (1966)
In the Summer House in Best Plays of 1953–1954 (1955)
The Collected Works (1966). Reissued as My Sister’s Hand in Mine (1978).
Feminine Wiles (1976)
Out in the World: Selected Letters of Jane Bowles, 1935–1970 (1985, 1990)
Jane Bowles: Collected Writings (2017) 

References

Category:1917 births
Category:1973 deaths
Category:American novelists
Category:American playwrights
Category:American LGBT writers