The Death of the Heart

First published in 1938, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart is a penetrating portrait of innocence encountering the guarded, often cruel world of adult society. Sixteen-year-old Portia Quayne, orphaned and displaced after a childhood spent moving between European hotels, comes to live with her half-brother Thomas and his elegant, emotionally remote wife, Anna, in their comfortable London home. Uncertain of the unspoken rules governing this household, Portia observes its inhabitants with a candour they find unsettling, recording her impressions in a diary that will have consequences she cannot foresee. When she becomes entangled with Eddie, a charming but unreliable young man, her longing for intimacy exposes the gulf between her own sincerity and the sophisticated evasions of those around her.

Divided into three sections entitled The World, The Flesh and The Devil, Bowen’s novel explores betrayal, emotional vulnerability and the painful education through which innocence becomes experience. Her exquisite attention to gesture, atmosphere and the hidden meanings of ordinary conversation reveals a society in which affection is entangled with pride, class and the fear of being truly known. Portia’s story is rendered with both psychological precision and a profound tenderness for those who have yet to learn the world’s compromises. Widely regarded as Bowen’s finest novel, The Death of the Heart secured her reputation as one of the great English-language novelists of the twentieth century, placing her alongside the major psychological realists of the modernist tradition.

From the book

“Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself — in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.”

— Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

On The Death of the Heart

“Time has not diminished Elizabeth Bowen’s 1938 masterpiece.”

— Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post