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The Death of the Heart

Elizabeth Bowen

3.69 · Rating details · 6,260 ratings · 476 reviews

The Death of the Heart is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen's best-known book. As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human motivations.

In this piercing story of innocence betrayed set in the ...more

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Paperback, 418 pages

Published May 9th 2000 by Anchor Books (first published 1938)

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Apr 09, 2019 Jaline rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2019-completed

What can any reader say about Elizabeth Bowen’s writing that hasn’t been said? Not a thing. I can only go by my impressions and what reading this novel made me feel.

The story is about a family. Although they appeared superficial and ‘on the surface’ to begin with, gradually through the novel, cracks showed up. As the cracks opened, and particles began to leak through, it became more and more apparent that something was fundamentally askew with this family. The surface civilities and What can any reader say about Elizabeth Bowen’s writing that hasn’t been said? Not a thing. I can only go by my impressions and what reading this novel made me feel.

The story is about a family. Although they appeared superficial and ‘on the surface’ to begin with, gradually through the novel, cracks showed up. As the cracks opened, and particles began to leak through, it became more and more apparent that something was fundamentally askew with this family. The surface civilities and not-so-civil, yet ever-so-subtle cuts began to reveal who they were underneath, and it was often completely at odds with what was presented.

Sixteen is an amazing age for any teenage girl, yet Portia had just been orphaned and had a vulnerability mixed with naivety with some surprising cynicism mixed in. Perhaps due to her upbringing, and perhaps partly due to the family she was part of, she is also needy in her own way. However, when other people cross invisible barriers she has drawn, the cynicism peeps out, sometimes coloured with her own developing philosophy.

Portia is supposed to live with her step-brother Thomas (20 years her senior) and his wife Anna for a year. I am still puzzling why exactly her father left a letter to that effect before he died. In some ways, (again, remembering her young age), she is the child Thomas and Anna never had, despite their efforts to have a child of their own. Maybe her father (and Thomas’) felt Portia could fill that gap. However, what happened instead is that she shed light through the cracks in the relationships of Thomas, Anna, and their crowd that may have helped them to look inward a bit, to talk about more than surface topics, and to resolve some neurosis along the way.

In this novel, Elizabeth Bowen explores deeper and deeper into the minds of the characters in this novel. With some, she even breaks through to their hearts. I found this to be a fascinating search for what is real and authentic beneath a surface that has been gradually crenelated over many years.

On my eReader, I have created folders (or Collections) for each month of the year. Once the last page is tapped, the novel goes back into its folder. For me, the ending happened so abruptly that I had to go back to my April collection, open the novel again, and re-read the last page. Sure enough: that was it – the end. Since then, everything I absorbed from this novel has continued to stir in my thoughts, and I can now see that it ended exactly as it was meant to.
...more

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Aug 25, 2013 Jaidee rated it really liked it

Shelves: four-ana-half-stars-books

4.5 "restrained and elegantly cruel" stars !

10th Favorite Read of 2015

"Bowen is a major writer....She is what happened after Bloomsbury....the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark." -Victoria Glendinning

Portia is sixteen and orphaned and sent to live with her half-brother and sister-in-law in 1930s London. Portia is extremely sensitive and extremely average. She moves from the bohemian countryside in Switzerland to an extremely elegant, tasteful but cold and ...more

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Feb 18, 2014 Violet wells rated it it was amazing

Shelves: london

There was a time in my youth when I fell in love with Elizabeth Bowen. Her gorgeous high baroque prose style ravished me. You know how sometimes a writer announces herself as a soulmate, settles herself thrillingly into your mind and begins to help you see with more clarity an aesthetic of the world you had only previously sensed? Elizabeth Bowen, following Virginia Woolf, did that for me. I felt we were soul mates. And Death of the Heart was my favourite of her novels.

Essentially it’s a novel There was a time in my youth when I fell in love with Elizabeth Bowen. Her gorgeous high baroque prose style ravished me. You know how sometimes a writer announces herself as a soulmate, settles herself thrillingly into your mind and begins to help you see with more clarity an aesthetic of the world you had only previously sensed? Elizabeth Bowen, following Virginia Woolf, did that for me. I felt we were soul mates. And Death of the Heart was my favourite of her novels.

Essentially it’s a novel about innocence. But Bowen adds something new to the standard ideas of innocence. For one thing it’s not necessarily a virtue in her eyes. Just the opposite in fact. Bowen sees innocence as a health hazard for civilised society. And, through the 16 year old orphan Portia, she explores the dismantling havoc innocence can wreak on civilisation’s defence structures – here represented by Anna and Thomas, a somewhat decadent married pair whose life is mostly refined ennui and whose home Portia enters. Portia herself was born outside of civilisation’s defensive ramparts – the child of an illicit affair on the part of Thomas’s father and an abiding source of shame to Thomas. So Portia enters the house as an enemy. And Portia, like most solitary outcasts, is a keen observer. She keeps a diary.

Death of the Heart is also a novel about secrets and betrayal. Both Anna and Thomas have guilty secrets. Most of all perhaps the sham nature of their marriage. And when Anna deviously reads Portia’s diary it’s as if this sham is suddenly and fatally exposed. Portia too feels betrayed - "One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power." Portia’s subsequent attempts to find a new home, both symbolically and literally, first with the rake Eddy and then the equally innocent and homeless Major Brunt wreak further havoc.

Bowen’s sense and therefore evocation of place is one of her great strengths as a writer. Few writers can conjure up place with so much haunting pulsing atmosphere – whether it’s the soulless harmonies of Windsor Terrace where Anna and Thomas live, Regent’s Park with its icy lake and, later, blooming roses, the seaside town of Seale or the seedy Bayswater hotel which down at the heel Major Brunt calls his home. Place in her books has agency. In this book place is home - the idea of home as sanctuary being another theme of this novel.

"After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee. Pictures would not be hung plumb over the centres of fireplaces or wallpapers pasted on with such precision that their seams make no break in the pattern if life were really not possible to adjudicate for. These things are what we mean when we speak of civilization: they remind us how exceedingly seldom the unseemly or unforeseeable rears its head. In this sense, the destruction of buildings and furniture is more palpably dreadful to the spirit than the destruction of human life."
...more

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Aug 03, 2019 Fionnuala added it · review of another edition

Shelves: bowen

The title of this novel could easily be the title of each of the other Elizabeth Bowen novels I've read so far, The Last September, Eva Trout, and The House in Paris. In all of them, young vulnerable people are acted upon by older seasoned people, resulting in change, change that is from then on irrevocable, as when the heart dies. No resuscitation, no return to the previous innocent state is possible.

Bowen records this process as if she were a documentary maker with an artistic eye, catching ...more

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Mar 23, 2011 Mariel rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: virgin with a memory

Recommended to Mariel by: virgin without a memory

This book is one of the reasons why I believe stories are redeeming. Like food, second chances, bringing back to life a deadened heart.

I love this book intensely as if it has some kind of gravitational pull or hold on me that reminds me of it during times of feeling what I cannot put name to. Frame of reference stuff. I found that I love it more as time passes and the life it still lives in my mind takes its place beside some of the most important moments I've had (um or something I've just made ...more

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Oct 24, 2016 Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, fiction, romance, 20th-century

The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
The Death of the Heart is a 1938 novel by Elizabeth Bowen set in the interwar period. It is about a sixteen-year-old orphan, Portia Quayne, who moves to London to live with her half-brother Thomas and falls in love with Eddie, a friend of her sister-in-law. At the beginning of the novel, Portia moves in with Anna and Thomas Quayne after her mother dies. Portia is Thomas's half sister. Mr. Quayne (Thomas's father) had an extramarital affair with Irene The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
The Death of the Heart is a 1938 novel by Elizabeth Bowen set in the interwar period. It is about a sixteen-year-old orphan, Portia Quayne, who moves to London to live with her half-brother Thomas and falls in love with Eddie, a friend of her sister-in-law. At the beginning of the novel, Portia moves in with Anna and Thomas Quayne after her mother dies. Portia is Thomas's half sister. Mr. Quayne (Thomas's father) had an extramarital affair with Irene (Portia's mother) while married to Thomas's mother. When Irene became pregnant, and Mrs. Quayne learned of it, she was adamant that he do what was the right thing: so, at his own wife's unyielding insistence, Mr. Quayne divorced Thomas's mother and married Irene. Mr. Quayne, Irene, and Portia then left England and traveled through Europe as exiles from society and from the Quayne family, living in the cheapest of lodgings. Irene and Portia continued to live in this fashion until, when Portia was 16, Irene died. Portia was sent to live with Thomas and Anna after Irene's death. The plan is that she is to stay with them for one year at which time Portia will leave and move in with Irene's sister (Portia's aunt). ...
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و چهارم ماه اکتبر سال 2016 میلادی
عنوان: مرگ قلب؛ نویسنده: الیزابت بوئن؛ برگردان: سما قرایی؛ تهران، نشر شور، 1391؛ در 320 ص؛ شابک: 9786009067466؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان انگلیسی - سده 20 م
در ابتدای رمان «پورتیا» در سن شانزده سالگی در دهمه 1930 میلادی، بسوی لندن راه میافتد، تا با برادر و خوهر ناتنی خویش زندگی کند و ... تلخی برباد رفتن دوران نوجوانی؛ هوس، سوءِ تفاهم، ضعف عاطفی دوران بلوغ، و تلخی معصومانه ی مورد خیانت واقع شدن، با طنز و طعنه. ا. شربیانی ...more

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Jun 22, 2018 Katie rated it really liked it

Shelves: set-in-the-uk

Death of the Heart is widely considered Elizabeth Bowen's masterpiece. I hadn't previously read any of her work but I didn't quite love this as much as I expected. Perhaps for all its refined sensibility and astutely critical social comedy there simply wasn't quite enough at stake to make it compelling for me.

The concept of home looms large. People either have homes or they don't. Portia, the main character, is a sixteen year old orphan who has lived most of her life in hotels on the continent ...more

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May 18, 2012 Jenn(ifer) rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: Lady Edith Crawley

Recommended to Jenn(ifer) by: Jean Rhys's ghost

Shelves: brits, xx, read-in-2013, summer-of-women-2013

The Death of the Heart -- a pretty melodramatic title, don't you think? I mean, I was expecting a torturous, ruinous love affair. Instead I got a sixteen year old whose auntie read her diary. Still, I enjoyed the story a great deal. The recently orphaned Portia goes to live with her half-brother and his disapproving wife. There she meets a cruel character who wins her heart then tosses her out with the rubbish once she has become too needy. It doesn't take much to win her heart, however. Needy ...more

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Apr 07, 2012 Chrissie rated it really liked it

Shelves: great-britain, hf, relationships, life-stages, england, love, classics, audible-uk, 2-itunes-library, 2018-read

Here is the story in a nutshell. Portia becomes an orphan at the age of sixteen. She has a married half-brother living in London, Thomas and his wife Anna. He is thirty-six and she twenty-six. Is Portia welcomed by them? No, not really. To one she is an embarrassment. To the other an encumbrance, a nuisance, but of course they agree to take her in for a year. It is the proper thing to do. The plan is to then send her off to a maternal aunt. The story concerns what happens during this year. The ...more

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Jun 26, 2011 Sarah rated it really liked it

Portia observes with a young girl's receptiveness. Elizabeth Bowen observes Portia with a woman's cool, discerning eye.

This book demonstrates how a predatory man will tell you, and tell you, and tell you that he's predatory...and how a lonely, young girl will refuse to see it. It demonstrates how a jaded, older woman can resent a young girl's innocence with inexplicable venom. Bowen shows all this and more with beauty, wit, and grace. Her book is about innocence, corrupted. But Bowen, herself, ...more

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May 30, 2008 Cecily rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics

Portia, 16 year old orphan, moves to stay with her adult half-brother and his wife. She's on the cusp of adulthood, but very naïve. Almost everyone is cold and detached. Mostly written as a novel, but with sections of diary and several letters - a contrast that feels a little odd.

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Jun 15, 2017 Alex rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2017

"There is no ordinary life" is what our poor naif Portia learns about society. She's like that Nell lady, born in the wilderness and sent suddenly into society without even a language to speak. Her education is brutal.

Upon her parents' death, she's sent to live with half-brother Thomas, 20 years her senior, and his wife Anna. They are sociopaths. Portia doesn't know what society is like, but society doesn't know what humans are like. "However much of a monster you may be," says Thomas to "There is no ordinary life" is what our poor naif Portia learns about society. She's like that Nell lady, born in the wilderness and sent suddenly into society without even a language to speak. Her education is brutal.

Upon her parents' death, she's sent to live with half-brother Thomas, 20 years her senior, and his wife Anna. They are sociopaths. Portia doesn't know what society is like, but society doesn't know what humans are like. "However much of a monster you may be," says Thomas to monstrous Anna, "I feel more natural with you then I feel with more natural people - if there are such things." They're joined by their hanger-on Eddie, who is also a sociopath. "I may be some kind of monster; I've really got no idea," he says. "The things I have to say seem never to have had to be said before. Is my life really so ghastly and so extraordinary?" Thomas again: "What proof have you that much nicer people do really exist?" Everyone despises Portia, who has this awful tendency to be nice.

No one knows anything. The answer to every question is I don't know. People are often described as animals. They're defined in negatives. Anna "only was not hostile from allowing herself no feeling at all." That word "not" appears a lot.

As you can imagine, none of this works out well for Portia, who's "like one of those children in an Elizabethan play who are led on, led off, hardly speak and are known to be bound for some tragic fate which will be told in a line." (And this does feel like a play, with a play's need to say everything. We can't just show it or imply it or hint at it: everyone's got to make some big Tennessee Williams speech where they lay it out. They're excellent speeches though.) And what will Portia's fate be? (view spoiler)

It's a frigid novel, with touches of modernism, and some people find it off-putting. I found it fascinating. Portia herself is a bit of a drip, but the sociopaths are terrific: Anna in particular is a complicated bag of awful, a sort of bloodless Lady Macbeth. "Life," we're learning, "is so much more impossible than you think." ...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Mark rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: people who like their sadnesses understated

Recommended to Mark by: Eugene

Shelves: bookclub-reads, books-to-unsettle

Happy that few of us are aware of the world until we are already in league with it

The story covers a period of some six months in which a newly orphaned 16 year old comes to live with her half brother and his wife. There she keeps a diary, becomes infatuated with another slightly older but still youngish lad, finds he is not quite the boy she had hoped or imagined and gets a bit upset.

Not much more happens then this really and yet i find myself giving it four stars, encouraging you to read it ...more

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Feb 02, 2018 Laura rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century-women

Very Victorian. I'm struggling with all 3 of the vile characters:Anna, Eddie, Thomas. I suppose the struggle lies in my distance from the social mores and principals of this time, late 30s.

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Mar 11, 2019 Kimberly Dawn rated it really liked it

The book was worthwhile reading for its social insights. I did enjoy some of the social commentary, and I enjoyed Eddie as a character study. He knew himself and his true intentions all along as he deceived an innocent, lonely girl, Portia.

It is too bad the Eddies of this world charm and deceive until the object of their affection begins to take them seriously; it is then they show their true selves and limitations.

The book is somewhat dated in many ways, but human nature is the focus and it ...more

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Oct 04, 2011 Mir rated it really liked it

Shelves: realism

Poor Portia. Poor everyone.

In real life I'm rarely this sympathetic to horrible people. Maybe I should be.

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Mar 31, 2013 nostalgebraist rated it it was ok

Shelves: modern-lit

This took me forever to finish. When I started reading it, it actually felt like a breath of fresh air -- I had been reading Angela Carter, William Gass, transhumanist SF, all of this mordant and grotesquely unreal stuff, and here was a work of plain old psychological realism, with people doing people stuff and thinking people thoughts and a careful author with a minimal, unflashy persona to relate it all.

Yet I slowed down around around p. 200, put the book aside for a long time, and after I This took me forever to finish. When I started reading it, it actually felt like a breath of fresh air -- I had been reading Angela Carter, William Gass, transhumanist SF, all of this mordant and grotesquely unreal stuff, and here was a work of plain old psychological realism, with people doing people stuff and thinking people thoughts and a careful author with a minimal, unflashy persona to relate it all.

Yet I slowed down around around p. 200, put the book aside for a long time, and after I picked it up again it took me a number of grueling weeks to force myself through the remaining half. This was for two reasons, which might actually be one single two-faced reason (more on that in a moment). First -- why phrase it delicately? -- this book is really, really boring. I can deal with books that have little or no plot, and indeed there is a plot in The Death of the Heart. It's just that it's doled out in small dollops spread sparingly between gigantic loaves of polite chit-chat.

It's possible that this has nothing to do with the book and everything to do with me. You know, I write these reviews on here as though I know what I'm talking about, but really I'm just a provincial sorta guy who reads science fiction and blokey classics like Joyce, and I guess in trying out books like this that are about all the vaguely tense nothing that goes on in fancy English houses, I'm trying to branch out. I try to branch out in a lot of ways -- I'm always curious what I'm missing -- and some experiments fail. Maybe I just demand a sort of action that this book, simply by virtue of its genre, can't provide.

But then I'd like to say that I am satisfied with purely psychological action, which is what this book feels like it's selling, and doesn't quite deliver. As I said, I originally categorized the book as "psychological realism," but the further along I got, the less apt that descriptor seemed. Bowen actually doesn't delve directly into her characters' thoughts, at least not in any straightforward way. Instead, much of the book is filled with descriptions of gesture, motion, and countenance, as though thoughts and emotions were mere implications of visible signs and not real entities in their own right. Rather than a growing acquaintance with the characters, I felt a growing unease with them, almost an "uncanny valley" feeling, as though they were machines or marionettes. Much of Bowen's description has the oddly physical, almost medical sound of the following passage:

When they came to the crossing, Lilian grabbed Portia's bare arm in a gloved hand: through the kid glove a sedative animal feeling went up Portia's elbow and made the joint untense. She pulled back to notice a wedding carpet up the steps of All Souls', Langham Place -- like a girl who has finished the convulsions of drowning she floated, dead, to the sunny surface again. She bobbed in Lilian's wake between the buses with the gaseous lightness of a little corpse.

This passage is an ideal transition point to the second of the two flaws I mentioned earlier, because it exhibits that one too. Notice the startling morbidity of the latter two sentences. They cry out -- in an obvious, almost melodramatic fashion -- to be interpreted as an indication of Portia's mental state (we know from context that she's having a bad time). Yet Bowen is actually not usually like this. Most of the time her prose is understated and her plotting minimalist. You read 20 pages of people sitting around making minute social gestures and asking each other whether they might like to go for a walk later on (while sending sedative animal feelings up each others' elbows and making each others' joints untense), and then suddenly one of these really lurid comparisons hits you and you have no idea what to make of it. It's like when some asshole musician starts out a recorded song real quiet to get you to turn the volume up, and then gets ear-shatteringly loud all of a sudden. You could say Bowen's book has a problem with "dynamic range."

The book is a tiny story about an angsty teenager getting burned in a bad first relationship, the kind of thing anyone reading the book has likely gone through (and, long ago, recovered from!). It is grandiosely titled "The Death of the Heart" and, although it isn't really concerned with sin or theology, it is divided like some Bosch triptych into three sections called "The World," "The Flesh," and "The Devil."

See what I mean?

I'm left feeling like I didn't really "get" this book, but I'm not sure what there was to get. I'm willing to assume that everything that unnerved me about it was a deliberate effect, but if so, why? Maybe it's all a way to try to get the reader into the teenage mindset -- that mindset where your minor personal drama really does seem that thunderingly huge. But if so, I think it can be done, and has been done, much more effectively. ...more

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Oct 23, 2016 Jill rated it really liked it

A beautifully written book from another time and place!

It was a difficult transition for me from contemporary fiction back to this slower & subtler style where so much is written but very little actually happens. It required me to read a lot between the lines.

Portia, a 16 year old orphan, moves to London to live with her half brother and sister-in-law resulting in emotional upheaval (repressed as it may be) for all. I especially enjoyed the relationship between Portia and her sister-in-law ...more

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Sep 04, 2018 Lisa rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audiobook, tbr-shelf-2018, 2018-favorites

[4.5] The Death of the Heart struck a chord in me. The novel, set in 1930s London, is about a 16 year old orphan, sent to live in a loveless household with her older brother and his wife. Bowen writes with sharp insight, compassion and wit about Portia's struggle to find her place. All of the characters, even the minor ones, are so incredibly well drawn and so real they could walk off the page. This is a subtle, stunning novel - the action is all in the heart.

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Dec 06, 2017 Sara rated it really liked it

Shelves: classics, women-writers

This was a sadly cynical and very aptly named novel. Portia, a sixteen year old orphan who is just beginning to search for understanding of what love means, finds herself living with her half-brother, Thomas, and his wife, Anna. While Portia studies Anna to see what being a woman should be, Anna dislikes Portia, primarily because Portia is too honest an observer. All the adults in this book live in a kind of masquerade of life, with a cloud of dishonesty hovering over them constantly, while This was a sadly cynical and very aptly named novel. Portia, a sixteen year old orphan who is just beginning to search for understanding of what love means, finds herself living with her half-brother, Thomas, and his wife, Anna. While Portia studies Anna to see what being a woman should be, Anna dislikes Portia, primarily because Portia is too honest an observer. All the adults in this book live in a kind of masquerade of life, with a cloud of dishonesty hovering over them constantly, while Portia is unschooled in deception and fails to understand that almost no one can be taken at face value.

Along the way, Portia opens her heart to a young man who has been present because of his attempts to woo Anna. This is English society at its worst, a world of sexual innuendo and flirtatious games in which everyone is hurt. Poor Portia is like a lamb at slaughter, and everyone seems to feel free to play with her feelings and sensibilities. There is the added sorrow of knowing this girl has just lost her mother and is in a strange place that makes some of their actions seem excessively cruel and unfeeling.

Portia’s encounters with life living in hotels with her mother, Irene; living in London with Thomas and Anna, and living for the spring at the beach in Searle with Anna’s former governess, give her an overview of different classes and strata and seem to indicate to the reader that love is fairly non-existent. You trust others at your own peril.

This book had moments in which I was sure it would be a 5-star read for me. But, in the end, the ending was somehow unsatisfactory. I understood the point being made, and perhaps it could not have ended differently, but it felt somewhat abrupt and incomplete. I have been mulling it overnight and this morning, and I think we are meant to feel the bleakness of Portia’s position and perhaps that this is life and more story would yield no different outcome.

I have perhaps said too much in this review. I never like to give away too much. But, I am sincerely wishing I had read this with at least one other person because there is so much here to grapple with and I’m unsure that I have skimmed the surface, let alone plumbed the depths. If you like a book that makes you puzzle over life, this one will. ...more

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Jun 18, 2011 Bethany rated it really liked it

From the back description, I was expecting this to be a major seduction story like, er, well, I can't think of any examples, though they are a dime a dozen. Anyhow, it wasn't; it was about the seduction of the mind: mental, not physical. It was Portia's mind, of course, that was seduced and inevitably, betrayed. (Is that why this is called a psychological novel?)

I rather liked Portia. She wasn't obnoxiously pathetic as I thought she would be. She wasn't when she was away from Eddie, that is. From the back description, I was expecting this to be a major seduction story like, er, well, I can't think of any examples, though they are a dime a dozen. Anyhow, it wasn't; it was about the seduction of the mind: mental, not physical. It was Portia's mind, of course, that was seduced and inevitably, betrayed. (Is that why this is called a psychological novel?)

I rather liked Portia. She wasn't obnoxiously pathetic as I thought she would be. She wasn't when she was away from Eddie, that is. Parts without him she was a dreamy loner type which I identify with since I am one. But she was extremely guileless, captivated by Eddie whose faults and inconsistencies she was blind to. I don't suppose I can cast the first stone, though; the attractions of girls are mysterious things and there is little I wouldn't do for someone who shows me kindness at a time when I'm feeling sadly at loose ends.
Eddie was indeed a Cad (with a capital 'C', yes.) who was in love with the sound of the words coming out of his mouth. Actually, he was not present in the flesh as often as I assumed he would be. Anna was the antagonist more than anyone.

Elizabeth Bowen told the story somewhat indifferently, I thought. Just in the sense she never tried to make you love (or hate, even) any of her characters. She just told it like it was, so to speak. Though she mostly portrayed her character's pettiness and absurdities, she also showed them during moments of worry, vulnerability, and insecurity. Those moments really resounded with me.
And her prose! She wrote little masterpieces of sentences and paragraphs full of brilliant imagery which made my little writer's heart pitter-pat with admiration and, of course, envy. Though some of her thoughts were dense and required more concentration on my part to grasp their meaning.

I suppose there were greater nuances and themes to this novel that I missed, as I am far from being the most discerning reader, but still I enjoyed this book and that is what matters most, in my opinion. Perhaps I shall read this 30 years from now and see what I get out of it. (Sometimes youth feels like a ball and chain.)
Incidentally, I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I was going to and I cannot think, or express at least, what it was that I liked. I know I really enjoyed Elizabeth Bowen's writing. She deserves all the praise she gets in that respect.

Sorry Sarah, this isn't much of a coherent or compelling review - The Death of the Heart may be doomed to languish on your bedside table a bit longer. ;) ...more

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Jun 05, 2009 Colleen rated it it was ok

I had a difficult time getting started with this downer of a book because Bowen's writing style is dense and, at times, confusing. From time to time she would lapse into sermons or analysis and my eyes would glaze over and I'd lose my focus. But eventually I got into the story and decided it was OK. There's not much of a plot and there's certainly little action or excitement. It's mainly a psychological story. There are lots of characters playing head games with each other. They're primarily ...more

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Jan 11, 2012 knig rated it really liked it

Shelves: feel-goods, 2012

I need to solve a mystery: all conspiracy theories welcome. Where exactly is the Kentish seaside town of Seale-on-Sea? It features in three of Bowen’s novels, prominently in ‘The Death of the Heart’ and not at all on Google maps. The only Seal in Kent has these are its coordinates:
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&a...

With the best will in the world, there is NO way Mrs Heccomb and Portia leave Waikiki House on the shore and trundle onto THIS Seal High Street for Bisureated Magnesia Tablets ...more

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Apr 09, 2012 Seth rated it it was amazing

Shelves: english-literature

For a review of Elizabeth Bowen’s Death of the Heart, you can’t do much better than Jonathan Yardley’s review published in the Washington Post in 2005: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
The themes of this novel are betrayal and innocence. As Yardley points out, the author believed that innocence must “be vanquished by experience.”

I would just add an observation about the communication styles displayed in this coming-of-age novel set in British upper and middle-class society prior to World ...more

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Aug 10, 2017 Kusaimamekirai rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction-ireland

This is a tricky review simply because I don't think I've ever been so fascinated and drawn into a novel where nothing happens. There are some minor events, diaries read, summers at the sea, starts and ends to relationships, but even in these strands, there's never any one decisive moment of resolution or something that takes your breath away. Rather there is a lot of sameness, a lot of meanness, a LOT of unhappiness.
The genius of this novel lies instead I'm the interior worlds of these ...more

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Apr 21, 2018 Mark rated it really liked it

‘Anna and I live the only way we can, and it quite likely may not stand up to examination.’

Thomas and Anna Quayne are both vacuous individuals, living ineffectual and unexceptional lives, surrounded by an equally docile set of acquaintances, all bound by the strictures and conventions of their class and its narrow horizons.

‘From the outside we may seem worthless,’ Anna suggests, shaken from her torpor, as, finally, a modicum of self knowledge appears to be dawning, and the story reaches its ‘Anna and I live the only way we can, and it quite likely may not stand up to examination.’

Thomas and Anna Quayne are both vacuous individuals, living ineffectual and unexceptional lives, surrounded by an equally docile set of acquaintances, all bound by the strictures and conventions of their class and its narrow horizons.

‘From the outside we may seem worthless,’ Anna suggests, shaken from her torpor, as, finally, a modicum of self knowledge appears to be dawning, and the story reaches its farcical denouement.

This biting satire on the effete upper classes, and their lightweight gentility, and sense of entitlement, provides a fitting climax to a tale of ineptitude and loathing, told through inference and implication : Portia hasn’t come home and Machett, the wise Old Housekeeper, is alarmed by the errant teenager’s unexpected absence. She is more concerned than either Portia’s step brother, Thomas, or his wife, Anna, whose passivity, detachment and lack of initiative are comic. The Quaynes have a tough call to make, that is way out of their compass, made doubly difficult as, the news that she isn’t in the house, comes, annoyingly, as they are enjoying pre-prandial drinks before dinner is served :

‘Goodness,’ Anna said tartly, ‘it’s not such a crisis yet. It won’t be even nearly a crisis for half an hour. Meanwhile it’s eight, the whole point is are we to have dinner ? I don’t know really, this sort of thing has never happened before…… We either have dinner or call the police.’

Portia, the naive, and rudderless, sixteen year old has arrived unannounced at the Kensington lodgings of the unsuspecting and crass Major Brutt, who realises he cannot shut and door and send her packing, and so finds, to his obvious chagrin, that she is now in his room and under his protection, and on his bed under the eiderdown. Such things could only happen to one whose easy-going life style has laid one open to accepting things, unquestioningly, come what may.

Major Brutt telephones the Quaynes to seek their assistance, and help resolve this impasse, and they in turn, look at each other, non-plussed, without an ounce of compassion or understanding for poor misguided Portia simply don’t know how to respond.

‘You say she’ll come home if we do the right thing..... Do we know what the right thing is?’

This is much more than a mere witty comedy of manners. It is a devastating critique of the gentille classes in 1930s London with the ineptness of Thomas and Anna Quayne underlying the whole sorry story. Portia, their ‘ward’ is a lonely innocent, unable to decipher the rules and protocols of a moribund society, and utterly unable to navigate her way as hers has been a childhood notable for its absence of love and neglect. ...more

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Apr 30, 2016 Roger Brunyate rated it it was amazing

Shelves: bildungsroman, women

The Unkindness of Civility

First off, let me say that the Anchor paperback edition is a pleasure to read, as are all the Bowen novels in this series. It has clean generous type, a binding that stays open, a cover that feels good in the hand, an attractive and totally relevant illustration, typography that captures both Bowen's elegance and her modernity, and—wonder of wonders—a back-cover blurb that brilliantly encapsulates the essence of this elusive novel. For example: "As she deftly and The Unkindness of Civility

First off, let me say that the Anchor paperback edition is a pleasure to read, as are all the Bowen novels in this series. It has clean generous type, a binding that stays open, a cover that feels good in the hand, an attractive and totally relevant illustration, typography that captures both Bowen's elegance and her modernity, and—wonder of wonders—a back-cover blurb that brilliantly encapsulates the essence of this elusive novel. For example: "As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sharp sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human motivations."

Not for nothing does the book-jacket writer compare Elizabeth Bowen to Henry James. For this is a very Jamesian subject. The recently-orphaned 16-year-old Portia, Bowen's heroine, is significantly older than James' Maisie ( What Maisie Knew ) and younger than his Isabel Archer ( The Portrait of a Lady ), but like them she is thrust into sophisticated society as a naive observer, and the book is mainly taken up by the author's razor-sharp dissection of that society and sensitive exploration of the heroine's feelings.

What is surprising here, even in comparison to Henry James or to the other Elizabeth Bowen novels that I have read ( The Last September and The House in Paris ), is that so little actually happens. Everything seems to point to a premature sexual affair which will proves disastrous for Portia, especially once she falls for the charms of the caddish Eddie, whose previous dalliances we have already seen described. Portia herself is the offspring of her father's late-life affair, which has forced him to leave his life of English respectability and to live abroad; there is a sense of unreliability in the bloodline. Even the title of the book, The Death of the Heart, and the subtitles of its three major parts—"The World," "The Flesh," and "The Devil"—all seem to be leading in this direction.

And yet, while sexuality is always present in the subtext (another Jamesian quality), it never tips over into action. This is a book in which so simple an event as a boy's holding the wrong girl's hand at a movie can have traumatic significance; there is no need to go farther. I can only think that Bowen's misdirection is deliberate. In the course of waiting for something to happen, the reader finds that he has absorbed countless details and impressions of everyday life that, taken cumulatively, have an even more devastating effect. This book is like a timed-release drug capsule; you may feel comparatively little after you have finished reading it, but it continues to work in the mind long after you have put it down.

In her three-part structure, Bowen contrasts two different strata of English society. The outer sections are set in the upper-class world of Portia's half-brother Thomas and his wife Anna, who live in an expensive house in one of the Nash Terraces fronting Regent's Park. Thomas is withdrawn and remote; Anna leads a busy social life with many male friends; they communicate only superficially with each other and hardly at all with Portia, who is forced to turn to the housekeeper, Matchett, as the nearest thing to a confidante. It is no wonder that she falls for Eddie, whom she sees as an outsider just like her. Meeting him at first assuages her loneliness, but his eventual small betrayals only serve to heighten it.

Contrasting with London society is a month that Portia spends with Anna's former governess Mrs. Heccomb, in an off-season seaside resort. Having been brought up in a similar resort town myself, I found Bowen's description of the wind-battered setting and the cheerfully rowdy life of the young people whom Portia meets there one of the most vivid sections of this excellently-observed book. While the apparently free-and-easy quality of this middle-class setting can be seen to have its own limitations and proprieties, it sends Portia back to town with an unbearable sense of the shallow frigidity of her life with Thomas and Anna. And the events of the weekend when Eddie comes down to join her, although slow to make their full effect, eventually alter their relationship (and Portia's view of herself) irretrievably.

One of the most poignant aspects of the book is its awareness of transience. Thomas and Anna are eminently settled in their house, their work, their society; even the constant motion of the Heccomb young people and their set is based on an underlying stability. But Portia's life has always been rootless, moving from one European hotel to another, staying out of season and in the cheapest rooms—rootless with one vital exception: the security of her parents' love. Eddie's rootlessness is of a more dangerous variety, coming of having rejected the life of his still-living parents without creating anything significant of his own to replace it, but it takes Portia time to realize the essential difference between them. The theme is further reflected in one minor character who will become important at the end: the sad Major Brutt, who "had a good war" but has been rattling around since, growing rubber in Malaya, and now staying in a seedy London hotel waiting for something to turn up; it is a touching portrait, albeit a frightening one.

And what will happen to Portia? Will her heart remain dead? Is it indeed her heart that dies? The book ends on a spiritual and psychological crisis, but it offers no resolution. Perhaps it is wishful thinking on my part, but I do not see her life ending in either tragedy or pathos, despite the book's title. Portia's first innocence has been dispelled, certainly, but there is an energy in her, a drive towards the good which I believe will enable her to learn from her experiences and ultimately rise above them. Not the least of the qualities of this admirable edition which I praised at the beginning is the cover painting, which goes far to contractict the implications of the title and declare that this wonderful novel is not, after all, depressing.
...more

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Feb 25, 2012 drea rated it really liked it

I should start by saying that I am horrible at writing about books I love, because when I truly love something, I get tongue-tied and bashful and feel like I can only express myself correctly if I am allowed to speak in exclamation points and cartwheels. But even though my heart started up in an illogical panic as soon as I saw the white expanse of the review box, I am trying with this one, gosh darn it, because, oh! It is lovely, and deserves all of the cartwheels.

I forget what made me I should start by saying that I am horrible at writing about books I love, because when I truly love something, I get tongue-tied and bashful and feel like I can only express myself correctly if I am allowed to speak in exclamation points and cartwheels. But even though my heart started up in an illogical panic as soon as I saw the white expanse of the review box, I am trying with this one, gosh darn it, because, oh! It is lovely, and deserves all of the cartwheels.

I forget what made me originally pick up a copy of The Death of the Heart. I wish I remembered, because I would like to thank it, along with whatever made the universe align a few weeks ago for this book to stalk me. Because suddenly it was everywhere that I turned. Mentioned in a blurb on Bookslut; lying innocently on a coworker's desk; sitting among a random browsing of the Modern Library's Best 100 Novels. And then I opened up a box of books that had been sitting in the corner for six months, and there it was, right on top of a stack of forty other forgotten books. "Okay!" I said. "I give! But just so you know, I am not reading this dictionary, which I also put in this box for some inexplicable reason."

And then I read the first 100 pages and was hooked, even though I am going to have a hell of a time explaining why. This is one of those books that has less of a traditional plot, and is more a million wonderful tiny insights that eventually decide to team up at the last moment for a lasting impact. Basically, The New Yorker was not lying when it called it "pscyhological," so if intense character portraits and a relentless mission to figure out what really makes people tick are not your thing, then it's probably going to leave you cold. But if they are, you should just save yourself some trouble and underline the whole dang novel.

Portia, sixteen and recently orphaned, has come to live in the town house of her reserved half-brother, Thomas, and his outwardly friendly, but inwardly unfeeling wife, Anna. Portia and Thomas were not close, as Portia's existence was the reason his mother demanded a late-in-life divorce from their father, but Thomas has granted his father's last request and invited Portia to stay the year to see "how things work out." For Portia, this stable existence is a marked difference from the string of coastal European hotels that she used to call home, and she is having trouble adapting, a struggle she chronicles in a diary that is secretly being read by an increasingly resentful Anna without her knowledge. The only people she feels close to are the house's head maid, Matchett, and Anna's young and manipulatively caddish friend Eddie. When Anna and Thomas go abroad, they send Portia to the seaside to stay with Anna's former governess and Eddie follows, leading to a Weekend of Epic Disillusionment (and 400 pages of me going Yaaaaaaay!)

As titles go, The Death of the Heart is a little obvious and melodramatic for me, but I will forgive it, because Bowen kills all her hearts so beautifully. Somehow, Anna and Thomas are dead inside and sympathetically human, and I love it. Thomas can't care for his sister, but he can get really annoyed when someone interrupts him from a pleasant Saturday afternoon spent doodling cartoon cats
on his desk blotter. (YOU HATE THIS TOO, don't lie). Anna should be the most sympathetic to Portia's crush on Eddie, having gone through a similar love affair fifteen or so years earlier, and yet she sees it all and doesn't intervene. Basically, I can't with the parallels. I can't. I want to smoosh their cheeks together, I love them so much.

But mostly, there's Portia. Not going to lie, if I were an orphan in 1930s London, pretty sure she would be me. I would be lurking and silently observing and falling in love with funny dramatic cads all over the place, so, naturally, I was Team Portia, which only made her eventual hardening of heart all the more powerful. Ugh, if any character ever deserved a puppy, SHE IS IT.

I am only giving this book four stars, because toward the end I was so addicted and desperate to know how Portia would end up that I was like STOP USING WORDS, JUST SHOOT THE STORY INTO MY VEINS, and Bowen insisted on continuing to write forty-paragraph philosophical asides every three pages or so. They were great at the beginning, and this lady knows her way around a philosophical aside,but when we finally got to that downward plot slope, I just wanted the momentum and only the momentum. HOWEVER, I want to re-read this one day, and I'm pretty sure it will go up to a 5 when I am less impatient.

But anyway. Here are two reviewers that are smarter about positive reviews than I am. Jonathan Yardley, say hey! Charlotte Freeman, you too! ...more

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Sep 27, 2018 Bookish Ally rated it it was amazing

Shelves: classics

Oh, did this book (written in 1938) hit me hard. In fact my emotions are still churning, and I went to multiple websites looking at character studies and reviews: I’ve never found such disparate opinions on a book before. I completely disagree with most of them. What I find singular, is that there are so many different experiences to be had within one book.

First, if you are a woman (I’m not saying this is ONLY a book for women) I want you to read this. If you have travelled into the season of ...more

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Jun 15, 2009 Lobstergirl rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: adults

Recommended to Lobstergirl by: Julia Turner, Slate Culture Podcast

Shelves: fiction

A book about a 16 year old girl that should be read by adults. Portia Quayne, newly orphaned and very innocent, goes to live with her stolid half-brother and his effortlessly, subtly malicious wife in 1930s London. She falls in love with a 23 year old; keeps a diary; goes to stay with the wife's former governess and her two grown children at the seaside. The novel plods and meanders along densely until about the last 40 pages when things begin to unravel emotionally for Portia and those around ...more

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Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer.

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“Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.” — 124 likes

“A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.” — 97 likes

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