In Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, Innocence Is a Dangerous Thing

Order The Death of the Heart

It begins in the off-season. London in winter, that strange, polite hush between the wars, where everything respectable seems just a little bit wrong. Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, first published in 1938, is a novel of atmosphere and emotional undercurrents, in which the chill outside is a mirror of the quiet betrayals within. Its subject is the damage done not by war, but by the cold war of English manners—and the quiet calamity of growing up. At its center is Portia Quayne, a sixteen-year-old orphan who arrives in the household of her much older half-brother, Thomas, and…