Her alcoholic father Vere Douglas Campbell left the family when Bowen was young and was eventually found dead on a London street.

[3] At the age of 16, Bowen wrote her first work of fiction, a violent historical novel set in medieval Italy titled The Viper of Milan.

Bowen died on 23 December 1952 at the St Charles Hospital in Kensington, London after suffering serious concussion as a result of a fall in her bedroom.

She also wrote under the names Joseph Shearing, George R. Preedy, John Winch, Robert Paye and Margaret Campbell.

[8] The Shearing novels were especially popular in the United States, with Moss Rose, The Golden Violet and Forget-Me-Not achieving both critical and commercial success, being championed by reviewers such as Phil Stong.

Bowen's supernatural short fiction was gathered in three collections: The Last Bouquet (1933), The Bishop of Hell (1949) (featuring an introduction by Michael Sadleir) and the posthumous Kecksies, edited for Arkham House in the late 1940s, but not published until 1976.

"[9] Reviewing The Crime of Laura Sarelle Will Cuppy stated, "Those who want a good workout of the more perilous emotions will do well to read Mr. Shearing's impressive tale of love, death and doom.... Join the Shearing cult and meet one of the most malevolent females in song or story.

"[16] Sheldon Jaffery stated that Bowen's "weird fiction ranks favorably with such distaff portrayers of the supernatural as Mary Wilkins-Freeman, Edith Wharton and Lady Cynthia Asquith.

"[17] By contrast, Colin Wilson criticized Bowen as a writer of "bad adventure stories" in a review of A Sort of Life by Graham Greene.