[1] In 1958, she won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction[2] for The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), a biography of the prominent lawyer of Elizabethan England.

[4] Bowen was an active amateur chamber music player, often playing violin with members of her family and with friends.

[6] At the time of Bowen's death in 1973, she was working on a biography of Benjamin Franklin; the unfinished book was published posthumously as Scenes from the Life of its subject.

She had four brothers, Henry ("Harry"), an attorney who lent his name to the large Philadelphia-based law firm Drinker Biddle & Reath (now Faegre Drinker),[7] and who was also a chamber music composer and conductor; Jim; Cecil, the founder of the Harvard School of Public Health; and Philip, inventor of the iron lung; and a sister, Ernesta.

One of her two biological grandsons, Matthew, is an author of creative non-fiction, stage / screenplays, and scholarly articles germane to his field of neuropsychology.