The Hotel

These were the balmy days of the 1920s. The English, liberated from one long war and not yet faced with the next had - at least when well-off- a confident kind of vitality. ''The Hotel'' was a comfortable hotel on the Italian Riviera, run for prosperous English visitors. It was a closed world of wealth and a setting for the inexhaustible comedy of casual personal relationships among a variety of ''nice'' people, all English, all wittily reflected with characteristic vivacity. Elizabeth Bowen''s wit, and her exact eye for social detail has often been compared to that of Jane Austen, and the similarity is perfectly captured in this, Elizabeth Bowen''s first novel.