How I Finally Lost My Heart (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Doris Lessing
- First Published: 1963
- Type of Plot: Psychological
- Time of Work: The mid-twentieth century
- Setting: London
- Principal Characters: The protagonist
- Genres: Psychological fiction, Short fiction
- Subjects: Love or romance, Women, Consciousness, Middle age, Dating
- Locales: London, England
The Story
In this first-person narrative, an anonymous woman in mid-life reflects on her life and loves and recounts an experience that she has recently had, the experience of losing her heart. She loses her heart neither in the romantic metaphorical sense of being powerless before desire for another nor in the literal sense of cutting her heart out of her body and throwing it away, not that she has not wished to do both in her life. She loses her heart in a transfiguring, dreamlike encounter with her own inner being.
In the narrator's ruminations on her past loves, she...
[The entire page is 1261 words long]
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