The Demon Lover

1. The Demon Lover

2. The Author (1) Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973). Born in Dublin, she moved to London in 1907, when her father became mentally ill. After her mother died in 1912, she was brought up by her aunts. During World War II, she remained in London and took an active part in the war effort, as an Air Raid Precaution warden and in the Ministry of Information. This experience clearly influences “The Demon Lover”.

3. The Author (2) Sexuality and love plays a large part in every major work by Bowen. The other major influencing factor in Elizabeth Bowen's life was the long string of wars fought during her lifetime. For example, when World War Two intruded into her life in the form of a demolished Regent's Park home, Bowen wrote her only major novel dealing with war.

4. Characters protagonist: Mrs Drover antagonist: K., the demon lover third-person narrator

5. Setting Where? Kensington, London. When? August, 1941 The setting is quite important, in that it has made Mrs Drover’s home strange to her and turned her neighbourhood into a “deserted hinterland”, even though it is in the city.

7. The Blitz (1) The Blitz was the sustained and intensive bombing of the United Kingdom by Nazi Germany during 1940–1941. Although the word Blitz is a shortening of the German word blitzkrieg, meaning "lightning war", it was not an example of blitzkrieg but was an early example of strategic bombing. It was carried out by the Luftwaffe against a range of targets across the UK, particularly concentrating on London.

9. The Blitz (2) The campaign took place from 7 September 1940 through to 16 May 1941. Aerial attacks on UK targets resumed in 1944 with the V1 and V2. The Blitz inflicted around 43,000 deaths and destroyed over a million houses, but failed to achieve the Germans' strategic objectives of knocking Britain out of the war or rendering it unable to resist an invasion.

11. The Blitz (3) During this first phase of the Blitz, an average of 200 bombers attacked London every night but one between mid-September and mid-November. By mid-November, the Germans had dropped over 13,000 tons of high explosive bombs and over 1 million incendiary bombs but had suffered less than a 1% casualty rate themselves. In 1940 and 1941 there was large scale evacuation of London, and other industrial cities, to rural towns, particularly in the north, southwest and Wales.

17. Mrs Drover 44 years old. Was engaged to a man who died in WWI. She didn’t get married until she was 32, and now she has three children. At the time of the story, her family has been driven out of its Kensington home by German bombs (just like Bowen herself had been).

18. Plot Mrs Drover returns to her abandoned London home to pick up some things. There she finds a letter, which seems to be from her old fiancé who was killed in WWI. In it, he writes about a promise she made 25 years before, to meet him on this exact day. Mrs Drover is understandably frightened, and after finding the things she needs she goes to get a taxi, thinking that the presence of someone else will ensure her safety, or at least calm her down. She steps into a taxi at the stroke of 7 o’clock, only to discover that the driver is (the ghost of?) her former fiancé. She is trapped in the taxi as it speeds into an abandoned part of the city.