deviousness and alleged self-hatred.

In “The Devil,” a more mature Portia returns to 2 Windsor Terrace to welcome Anna and Thomas. With spring, the rain suggests that disclosures and feelings may at last pour forth freely. Back home from what might have seemed a romantic holiday, Anna and Thomas are seen in a private encounter that reveals the state of their marriage: Thomas approaches his wife affectionately in her room, but she rebuffs him with the complaint that he is wrinkling her quilt. This dismissal parallels Portia’s rejection by Eddie. Brother and sister walk together in the park, bonded by ties of unrequited love that they cannot suspect.

Portia learns from St. Quentin Miller, the novelist playing the diabolical informer, that Anna is reading her diary. “It is madness to write things down,” he tells her, stating a subtheme of the novel—written communications. The diary, Eddie’s failed novel, St. Quentin’s literary successes, Mrs. Heccomb’s pitiful shopping list, the many letters exchanged, and Anna’s and Portia’s hoarded love letters are all texts that negotiate and embody secret emotions. Once she learns of Anna’s betrayal, Portia flees for refuge, first with Eddie—in vain—and then with Major Brutt at the seedy Karachi Hotel. She begs Brutt to marry her, tactlessly telling him they are alike since Anna scorns them both. At the close, the housekeeper Matchett is sent to bring her back, while at home Anna suffers a change of heart. The novel is open-ended, the homecoming confrontation not depicted. From a window of the Karachi Hotel, tentative piano music floats. At last “a chord” is struck; with this word play, the author gives an optimistic sign that greater harmony may prevail in the family.

*London

*London. Capital and largest city of Great Britain. As one of the novel’s characters walks through Covent Garden during the evening, the narrator describes a feeling of desolation, which is representative of a city “full of such deserts, of such moments, at which the mirage of one’s own keyed-up existence suddenly fails.” In this instance, the keyed-up character is Eddie, a dashing young man who has attracted sixteen-year-old Portia, the novel’s protagonist. She wants to believe that he represents an antidote to the cold, staid life she encounters in her brother Tom’s home near Regent’s Park.

Portia has come to stay in London after her father’s death. She is a love child, born of her father’s liaison with a woman outside his marriage. His legitimate son Tom has honored his father’s desire to have Portia come to live with him for a year in London. Neither Tom nor his wife Anna, who dislikes Portia and invades her privacy by reading her diary, really wants to make a place for her in their lives.

*Regent’s Park

*Regent’s Park. Large public park in London. The whole Regent’s Park area is described in terms that enclose Portia in a dehumanizing vacuum. The novel opens with a description of the Regency buildings at dusk: “colourless silhouettes, insipidly ornate, brittle and cold.” These very words might be used to describe Tom and Anna, who never take a warm or colorful interest in Portia’s feelings or experiences.

*Seale

*Seale. Resort town on southeastern England’s Kentish coast which provides Portia with a respite from her dour London life. Tom and Anna have sent her there to stay with Mrs. Heccomb, Anna’s former governess, while Tom and Anna are in France for a summer holiday. Portia enjoys the more sympathetic Mrs. Heccomb, who does not have the reserve that Portia finds so alienating in London. Mrs. Heccomb’s children respond to Portia more forthrightly and expansively, energizing her and prompting her to ask permission to invite Eddie to come down from the city. Eddie’s visit proves to be a disaster, however, for he pays more attention to Daphne, Mrs. Heccomb’s daughter, than to Portia. Portia’s seaside idyll is destroyed as she realizes that Eddie really is no different from other secretive, duplicitous Londoners.

Returning to London, Portia learns that Anna has discussed Portia’s diary with Eddie and another male friend, St. Quentin, a writer. Feeling that she has no place in the city, Portia refuses to return to Regent’s Park and calls upon Major Brutt, an unlucky Englishman who has hoped to secure employment from Anna’s friends.

*Karachi Hotel

*Karachi Hotel. Residence of Major Brutt in the Kensington section of London in which the novel concludes in an agonizing scene. The hotel has been formed out of two houses. It is as grim and heartless as Tom and Anna’s Regent’s Park home. The bare windows, the poor moldings, the feeble lighting of the rooms, the “unsmiling armchairs” express the dimness of Portia’s prospects. The hotel is a space of “extensive vacuity,” and like other hotels in the area, “no intimate life can have flowered” inside such walls, even when they were homes.

Portia has come to Major Brutt because she believes he is as desperate and isolated as she is. When he tries to make her return to Regent’s Park, she refuses, pointing out that Tom and Anna have as much scorn for him as for her. In his austere, remote attic room, she offers to marry him, but he responds by calling Tom and Anna, who send their servant Matchett to fetch her.

The Death of the Heart earned commercial and critical success when it first appeared. Earlier admirers focused on Bowen’s sparkling social satire, and the theme of childhood innocence confronting adult experience. Feminist readings find Bowen alert to questions of gender and to the mother-daughter bond that scholars such as Ellen Moers and coauthors Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert have examined among traditional women novelists.

Female wards and orphans were commonplace in nineteenth century fiction. The dependent state of Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), the heroine’s orphanhood in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and that of Dorethea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872) compelled—or liberated—the single woman to forge her way unencumbered, whether as a poor relation or as an heiress. A living mother might be an awkward role model, like Mrs. Bennet in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). The harsh stepmother, typified by Mrs. Reed in Jane Eyre, could drive the orphan to find salvation outside the home.

Approaching the tradition afresh, Bowen gives her protagonist an array of mother surrogates. The sisterly biological mother dies without poignance, unlike Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). Bowen steers clear of the obvious pitfall of the stereotypical vicious stepmother, a folk motif form Cinderella and Snow White. Interestingly, she reverses gender expectations by endowing her male characters with the tenderest emotions—vulnerability, tears, an excess of passionate loving. Romance does not prove a viable route for the heroine, however, since there is no suitable man, the most heroic being the sad, solitary Major Brutt. The story touches on the heroine’s flight from her guardians to marriage, another feature of the Bildungsroman, but rejects the solution.

Bowen proposes that a young woman may have a greater chance to develop in a family whose members are imperfect but well meaning than as an alienated wanderer with a single parent who is loving but socially unconnected. Not irrelevant is the novel’s fairy-tale element that the orphan is a beneficiary of her brother’s fortune. Home is salvation. The adolescent’s need of a loving home, where she can express herself and where family members respect one another, ranks high with Bowen.

The Inter-War Years
The interval between World War I and World War II (1918–1939) was a time when many individuals grew disillusioned with society, politics, and traditional institutions. The devastation of the First World War had shattered the optimism of many British citizens, who had once believed that the new century would herald a prosperous era for humanity and the United Kingdom in particular. This disillusionment may explain why, in The Death of the Heart, the Quayne household appears detached from most local and global events of the 1930s.

During the 1930s, under Hitler's regime, Germany was rearming in preparation for aggression against its neighbors. However, Britain's foreign policy became complacent, and the government was reluctant to confront the looming international crises, as domestic issues were already overwhelming. The working class began to unionize, leading to deteriorating labor relations. In the 1926 General Strike, two million workers protested against plans to reduce wages and extend working hours. Although the strike itself did not succeed, trade unions realized that electoral victories could provide them with genuine power to enact change.

The Depression
The global economic depression, which started with the 1929 stock market crash, severely impacted Britain’s economy. Despite signs of recovery by the mid-1930s, Britain still faced an unemployment crisis and a decline in its traditional export industries, complicating the country’s ability to pay for imported foods and raw materials. While traditional industries like coal mining and cotton manufacturing remained in decline, other sectors such as electrical engineering, automobile manufacturing, and industrial chemistry were experiencing growth.

The City of London
In the 1930s, the depression and growing concerns about Germany's actions had a sobering effect on the atmosphere in London. Dance halls, which had been popular during and immediately after World War I, saw a decline in prominence. London's skyline had changed only gradually since the 1600s, giving the city a sense of permanence and history. Public transportation expanded significantly in the early 20th century with the establishment of tramlines and omnibus routes. Following World War I, there was a substantial expansion in railway lines, improving access to London for those living in suburban and rural areas around the city.

Struggles over Women’s Rights
The 1920s brought significant social changes in Britain, including the achievement of equal rights for women—but only after a prolonged period of struggle.

Emmeline Pankhurst spearheaded the movement for women's suffrage in Britain. She founded the Women’s Franchise League in 1889 and helped establish the National Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903. Their aggressive campaign, which called for complete voting rights for women, led to public demonstrations and even acts of violence such as breaking windows. Pankhurst and her supporters often faced harsh treatment from the police and were sometimes imprisoned for their actions.

Women in Britain initially gained the right to vote in 1918, but this was limited to women who were at least 30 years old and householders, meaning "wives." It wasn't until 1928, the year of Pankhurst’s death, that women were granted equal voting rights with men.

The 1920s and 1930s saw a significant increase in the number of women working compared to the pre-World War I era, and the average age of marriage rose significantly. Employment opportunities for women expanded to include positions in shops and new light industrial factories. It also became more common to see women smoking in public. While women’s colleges had been reluctantly accepted at Oxford and Cambridge since the 1870s, women were not allowed to earn degrees at Oxford until 1921 and at Cambridge until 1948.

Point-of-View
The narrative of The Death of the Heart is presented from various perspectives. The primary narrator typically adopts an omniscient stance, observing the story from a higher vantage point and conveying it with an authoritative tone. This narrator establishes the scenes, such as when introducing each of the three sections of the book. For instance, the park is depicted in parts one and two, while the Quayne’s residence is described in part three. Additionally, the narrator provides insights into the characters' thoughts with a clarity that surpasses the characters' own understanding. Daphne’s initial perception of Portia is negatively influenced by her association with Anna, prompting the narrator to remark, “It was clear that her manner to Portia could not be less aggressive until she had stopped associating her with Anna.” The narrator has access to Daphne’s thoughts and emotions, perhaps even more than Daphne does herself.

A significant portion of the story is also conveyed through the perspectives of various characters. For example, some sections are presented as entries from Portia’s diary, where the narrative is entirely filtered through her perceptions and emotions. This allows Bowen to introduce a touch of irony, such as when Portia recounts Thomas inquiring about Eddie. “I hope he is polite... does he try it on?” Thomas asks. Portia is oblivious to the fact that Thomas is subtly asking if Eddie has made any advances towards her. When she responds that she doesn’t understand, Thomas drops the subject.

Occasionally, the narration abruptly shifts from the third-person to the first-person perspective. For instance, when Anna is alone, contemplating her inability to comprehend others, the story is narrated from a third-person omniscient viewpoint: “There seemed to be some way she did not know of by which people managed to understand each other.” Suddenly, in the next paragraph, the reader is inside Anna’s mind, and the narrative switches to the first-person perspective: “All I said to Thomas was, get off my quilt.”

Setting
Bowen’s vivid descriptions of the novel’s settings significantly enhance the story’s tone. She meticulously paints detailed pictures of the characters’ environments. The Quayne’s residence is a large, opulent house on Windsor Terrace, adorned with the finest furniture, drapes, and rugs. Anna pays close attention to every aspect of the house’s appearance, expressing dissatisfaction when Portia does not keep her room as Anna deems appropriate, and chastising Thomas for placing a glass improperly in his library. Everything in the Quayne household is meticulously arranged, always in its designated place. Portia, accustomed to the bustling noise of a hotel, finds the house almost unnervingly quiet.

Conversely, Mrs. Heccomb’s residence in Seale-on-Sea, named Waikiki, exudes a much more relaxed vibe. The name itself is casual and exotic, and her children are constantly rearranging the furniture for parties or other gatherings. The house, located right on the beach, features numerous windows and is decorated with lampshades hand-painted by Mrs. Heccomb, along with comfortable yet worn-out furniture. A radio usually blares loudly, and Mrs. Heccomb’s two grown children are as lively as puppies, bounding up and down the stairs. Portia can hear the household bustling in the morning as they bathe and prepare for the day.

Hotels as homes are depicted in the novel in two significant ways: the various hotels where Portia and her parents resided, and the Karachi Hotel where Major Brutt lives. Portia holds fond memories of the hotels she stayed in, despite them offering a less physically comfortable lifestyle compared to her current situation at the Quayne’s. “We used to make up stories about people at dinner, and it was fun to watch people come and go,” she tells Thomas. When Portia is overwhelmed by Anna and Eddie’s deceit, she seeks refuge at Major Brutt’s hotel, perhaps because hotels are the environments she is most familiar with and where she feels the safest.

StructureThe Death of the Heart is organized into three parts of similar length, with each part further divided into chapters. Each section corresponds to Portia’s location during a particular season: Part one is set in London during winter; in part two, Portia moves to Seale-on-Sea for the spring; and in part three, she returns to London as summer approaches.

The three sections of the book are titled, “The World,” “The Flesh,” and “The Devil,” which are traditionally considered by Christians to be the three adversaries humans must overcome to remain virtuous. These concepts are also found in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. “The World” represents secular matters; “The Flesh” symbolizes the pursuit of sensual pleasures; and “The Devil” stands for temptations to commit evil acts, such as theft and lying.

Throughout the novel’s three parts, Portia undergoes experiences that align with these titles. In “The World,” she arrives in London, a new and unfamiliar environment for her. In “The Flesh,” she shares her first kiss with Eddie and later sees him holding hands with Daphne. In “The Devil,” further deceit is revealed when she discovers that Anna has been reading her diary and sharing its contents with others.

1930s: Women in England, like Daphne and her friends, are experiencing their first decade of equal voting rights with men, a milestone achieved in 1928.

Today: Following the 1997 general election, 120 women are now Members of Parliament, doubling the number from the 1992 election. Currently, 12 women serve in the Prime Minister’s Cabinet, and 16 women hold ministerial roles.

1930s: Women in England are beginning to explore the possibility of working outside the home. During World War I, over a million women filled jobs left by men who were fighting, but post-war, the government faced union pressure to return these jobs to men. However, the 1920s and 1930s saw growing acceptance of women working in shops, offices, factories, and light industry. By the 1930s, it was common to see young working women like Daphne enjoying evenings out dining and watching movies.

Today: Women constitute 45 percent of the workforce in the United Kingdom, and Britain employs more women than any other European nation. Women occupy roles across government, education, medicine, business, and other professions, and they initiate about 35 percent of new business ventures.

1930s: Upper-class women like Anna regularly indulge in “low tea” with friends each afternoon, a small meal to hold them over until dinner. This tradition includes drinking tea and eating thin crustless sandwiches, shrimp or fish patés, toasted breads with jams, and pastries such as scones and crumpets. Commercial tea rooms also gain popularity, especially among young women like Portia, who meets Eddie at Madame Tussaud’s for afternoon tea early in their relationship.

Today: Teatime remains a cherished tradition in England and Commonwealth countries. In the United States, tea rooms have become increasingly popular, although many mistakenly refer to the small afternoon meal as “high tea,” which is actually a more substantial, later meal meant to serve as dinner. While tea and scones are still staples, some tea rooms now offer champagne and strawberries, adding an American twist to the meal.

1930s: Only affluent families can afford the luxury of vacations abroad, such as Anna and Thomas Quayne’s trip to Capri.

Today: Six out of ten British residents take at least one extended holiday each year, either domestically or internationally, and British spending on international vacation travel is on the rise.

In 1985, Granada Television in the United Kingdom created a television film adaptation of The Death of the Heart. The movie featured JoJo Cole as Portia, Wendy Hiller as Matchett, Patricia Hodge as Anna, and Miranda Richardson as Daphne.

Sources
Dunleavy, Janet E., “Elizabeth Bowen,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 15: British Novelists, 1930–1959, Part 1: A-L, Gale Research, 1983, pp. 33–46.

Henn, Martha, “Bowen, Elizabeth Dorothea Cole,” in Feminist Writers, edited by Pamela Kester-Shelton, St. James Press, 1996, pp. 57–60.

Kenney, Edwin J., Jr., in Elizabeth Bowen, Bucknell University Press, 1975, p. 18.

Kilfeather, Siobhán, “Elizabeth Bowen,” in British Writers, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992, pp. 77–96.

O’Faolain, Sean, “Elizabeth Bowen; or, Romance Does Not Pay,” in The Vanishing Hero: Studies in Novelists of the Twenties, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1956, pp. 167–90.

Parrish, Paul A., “The Loss of Eden: Four Novels of Elizabeth Bowen,” in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XV, No. 1, 1973, pp. 86–100.

Rubens, Robert, “Elizabeth Bowen: A Woman of Wisdom,” in Contemporary Review, Vol. 268, No. 1565, June 1996, pp. 304–07.

Tillinghast, Richard, “Elizabeth Bowen: The House, the Hotel & the Child,” in New Criterion, Vol. 13, No. 4, December 1994, pp. 24–33.

Further Reading
Bloom, Harold, ed., Elizabeth Bowen, Chelsea House Publishers, 1992. This is a compilation of critical essays on Elizabeth Bowen's works, edited by the respected critic and scholar Harold Bloom.

Bowen, Elizabeth, Graham Greene, and V. S. Pritchett, Why Do I Write?: An Exchange of Views between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and V. S. Pritchett, M. S. G. Haskell House, 1975. This book features correspondence among these three literary figures, discussing their thoughts on the life and craft of writing.

Halperin, John, Eminent Georgians: The Lives of King George V, Elizabeth Bowen, St. John Philby, and Nancy Astor, St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1998. John Halperin explores the influence of these prominent personalities in England between the world wars, delving into the complexities beneath the glamorous facade of British society in the 1920s and 1930s.

Walshe, Eibhear, ed., Elizabeth Bowen Remembered: The Farahy Addresses, Four Courts Press, 1998. These essays, derived from annual lectures at the church in Farahy, North Cork, where Bowen is interred, offer insights into the life, writings, and philosophies of the Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen.