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Analysis of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 24, 2025

Constructed with a third-person omniscient narrator, but interleaved with first-person diary entries and letters, this novel scrutinizes the emotionally empty lives of the prestigious and wealthy Quayne household through the eyes of Portia, the 16-year-old half-sister of Thomas Quayne. Portia has been orphaned by the death of her mother, with whom she had lived a transient life in European hotels. They had been close, but their life had been rootless.

When Portia comes to London to live with Thomas and his wife, Anna, she finds the opposite situation: a couple rooted in respectability and stability but lacking children or even love. In their fine house, material objects are almost fetishized, taking the place of human tenderness and absorbing the reverence usually reserved for religious devotions.

With a teenager’s insouciance, Portia is indifferent to the material world of tastefully chosen furniture; from Anna’s perspective, Portia is an engine of disorder. When she finds and reads Portia’s diary, her distaste for her sister-in-law becomes amplified tenfold: her pride is wounded as she interprets the diary to mean that Portia is laughing at her. Portia observes and records the interactions and conversations in the Quayne household with an unsparing honesty that disturbs Anna because of the coldness of the accurate picture it creates. Anna is devoted to beauty and refinement, but she is also dependent on hypocrisy and upper-class snobbery to insulate herself from anything too coarse, common, or vulgar.

Portia’s social circle remains very narrow in her brother’s house, so that her growing awareness of her awakening desires finds few outlets. Lonely old Major Brutt is friendly to her, but she eventually falls in love with Eddie, a 23-year-old employee of her brother. Her feelings toward him are sincere and painfully intense, while he merely toys with her, sending her provocative letters that she hides and rereads in secret. Anna, too, has a stash of secret letters from her former fiancé, and she too relishes them in secret. The woman and the girl are well suited to form a deep and meaningful bond if only they can make the connection.

When Thomas and Anna take a vacation, Portia stays with Anna’s former governess, Mrs. Heccomb, and her two stepchildren. The visit to “Waikiki,” as Mrs. Heccomb calls her seaside home, is a comic interlude that allows Portia to meet a variety of people her own age who would never be deemed good enough for admittance to the Quayne household. Eddie comes for a visit, and Portia sees him drinking and flirting with other girls, but she decides she can accept these flaws.

For his part, Eddie’s inability to take seriously a romantic attachment to a young woman is part of his particular challenge in life: Bowen subtly suggests his suppressed homosexuality, a taboo topic in literature at the time she was writing.

When Portia returns home to welcome the travelers, she learns that Anna has been reading her diary. Angry and resentful, she experiences the same wounded pride that Anna had felt and runs away, sure that Anna is laughing at her. She goes to the sad hotel where Major Brutt rents a room, determined to break with her family permanently. She is luckier than many of the ingénues in literature; Bowen concludes the novel with ambiguity, but also with the suggestion that Portia and Anna and Thomas have a chance to resolve their differences.

Bowen’s work in general and this novel in particular have benefited from the interpretive insights of feminism. The motherless child and the childless mother of this novel both provoke critical inquiry about the parental role that has been the traditional domain of women. But the novel is also a young woman’s bildungsroman that refuses to accept the usual formula of courtship and marriage as the rose-strewn path to personal fulfillment.

The problems that the young must overcome remain the same—the three sections of the novel are entitled “The World,” “The Flesh,” and “The Devil”—but the same old solutions may not be enough to make life a more satisfying experience. Bowen illustrates her point in a novel that is both poignant and comic, capturing the insightful freshness of youth without pressing it into a stereotypical conclusion.

Bibliography
Heath, William W. Elizabeth Bowen: An Introduction to Her Novels. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961.
Lassner, Phyllis. Elizabeth Bowen. Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1990.
Lee, Hermione. Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation. London: Vision Press, 1981.