Elizabeth Bowen: Born into the Anglo-Irish gentry (her family home was Bowen’s Court, near Dublin), Elizabeth Bowen set her finest works not in Ireland but in London. The Heat of the Day, for example, is one of the most effective of all evocations of London in the Blitz and examines the love affair of Stella Rodney and Robert Kelway, doomed by both the large-scale upheaval in which it is conducted and by the sinister machinations of Stella’s other suitor who betrays the fact that Kelway is a spy. As the plot moves towards its inevitable and foreshadowed conclusion, the themes of love and betrayal play themselves out against the backdrop of a city at war, one in which all the characters seem to have lost their bearings.

 In The Death of the Heart, published in the late 1930s, Portia Quayne is an innocent abroad in the deracinated world of metropolitan sophisticates. Orphaned by the death of her mother, with whom she had been leading a peripatetic life in assorted hotels on the Continent, the sixteen-year-old Portia is taken in by her wealthy half-brother and his wife who live in some style in fashionable London. 

All three of them find the new arrangements difficult but it is when Portia’s naïvely insightful diary falls into the hands of her sister-in-law Anna and when the young girl believes herself to have fallen in love with Eddie, a vain and self-centered admirer of Anna, that trouble really begins. Finally, Portia flees her half-brother’s house and takes refuge in a residential hotel in Kensington. 

Curiously, Elizabeth Bowen did not like her own novel overmuch and she once dismissed it as ‘an inflated short story’. 

Today its tragicomic portrait of a vulnerable young girl bemused by the new world into which she is thrust seems far more powerful and perceptive than its author was prepared to acknowledge. 

The Heat of the Day; The Last September >> Henry James, What Maisie Knew; William Trevor, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel; Angus Wilson, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot