Series II: Personal Papers, 1810-1951

Series II Personal Papers contains Bowen’s literary agreements (contracts), correspondence, photographs, genealogical material, a scrapbook, and a small collection of press cuttings that include reviews of her books. The agreements cover both her writings and radio appearances. Most of the correspondence is fan mail, but it does include letters from noted writers such as Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Algernon Methuen, William Roughead, and Rebecca West. One folder holds letters from Edward Wagenknecht, a professor at Boston University, who studied and later published Bowen's writings in anthologies; additional correspondence between Wagenknecht and Hilary Long is in Series III, as well as more than three hundred letters from Bowen to Long.

A folder of genealogical material contains correspondence with distant relatives regarding the Ellis, Campbell, and Bayley families, and includes three nineteenth-century manuscript memoirs of Marjorie Bowen’s ancestors: on Bishop John Ellis (1785-1855), a Moravian clergyman who represented the church in Antigua, Jamaica, and Barbados from 1818 to 1855, written by his third wife; on Elizabeth Bowen Ellis (1792-1842) by her son Charles Bowen Ellis (1821-1887); and a memoir of the latter, who was born in Antigua and was also a Moravian minister and missionary, by an unidentified sibling. Notebooks consists of three commonplace books with research and personal education notes, poems, and a list of publications (to 1910). Photographs contains portraits of Bowen, her children and ancestors, in particular her father's family, and the interior of her home at 46 Markham Square, London. The series ends with a folder of reviews by others of her books, a scrapbook, and miscellaneous ephemera.