(We had a previous
entry about Bowen, so I have copied some paragraphs.)
Elisabeth Bowen
was an Irish-born author, but she did her literary activities within a cultural
club in London called The Bloomsbury Group, which had its
headquarters in the neighbourhood of the British Museum and whose most famous
members were the writer Virginia Woolf and the economist John M. Keynes (whose
main idea was that the government had to intervene in the economy to correct
the bad effects of the capitalism).
She was born in
Dublin in 1899 and spend her childhood in a big country house with a large
park. Her family belonged to the Anglo-Irish class that had dominated Ireland
for centuries. Her novel The Last September deals with the
situation of her class during the Independence War and the Irish Civil War.
When she was seven, she went to live in England, where she studied. When she
was 24, she married and published her first book, a collection of short
stories, Encounters, that was a great success and encouraged her to
go on writing. From then on, she wrote a book every year and a lot of book
reviews.
Her stories are
usually about the upper class, and she writes in a sophisticated style.
But Bowen isn’t
very well-known here: in Catalan you aren’t going to find any translation, and
there are only some of these books in Spanish. If you want to find her works in
the library, click here.
The Demon
Lover
The short story
that we’re reading has autobiographic details because during the World War II
she worked in London for the War Ministry. In the title we find the word demon;
this word has the meaning of "evil spirit", but is also a variant
of daimon, that only means "spirit". So, we don't know
exactly if the lover is bad or not. The story is about a (happily?) married
woman during the Blitz. She had a boyfriend in the WWI, but he was reported
missing or dead, and she forgot him. But now, after 25 years, she got a
suspicious letter. Could it be from her old boyfriend saying that he wants to
fulfil the promise of marrying her? This boyfriend, what kind of person/being
was/is he?
The Demon Lover: audio
The Demon Lover Study Guide
The Demon Lover: summary, characters, analysis
Presentation (minutes 00-3.30)
QUESTIONS
Which are the first hints of the
Blitz?
Why do you think the woman is prosaic?
Why is a “tenseness preceding the fall
of the rain” before she read the letter?
Why did she look at the mirror after
reading the letter?
Why did she look at it “stealthily”?
Describe the protagonist.
What was the effect of the raining
when he opened the chest?
What did she remember best from
their last meeting (a physical mark)?
Why did she wish him already gone
when they were saying goodbye?
Describe the boy.
Describe their last meeting.
Was she really in love with him? How
do you know?
Tell us about Mrs Drover’s life
after discovering her fiancée was missing or dead.
Why was she “unable to be with her
back exposed to an empty room” and preferred to “sit against the wall”?
A crisis is mentioned: what
crisis is it?
Why did she decide to take the
objects she had come to fetch and not to run away immediately?
“She tugged at the knot she had tied
wrong”: what is its connotation?
What are her feelings now about her
old fiancée?
When she is in the point of leaving
the house, what reassures her? And in the street? And what scared her before
leaving?
Why does the narrator use this
expression: “a hinterland of deserted streets”?
What was the appointed time?
What details suggested us that her old fiancée was the taxi driver?
Some people say the story means that “we are always tied to the past”. What is your opinion?
VOCABULARY
boarded up, contemptuous, bedspring, flicker, foresworn (forsworn), plight your troth, (without) stint, score, desuetude, rally, fumbling, to be in a mood, tread, creek, pant, issue, perambulator (pram)