Elizabeth Bowen's The Demon Lover

“The Demon Lover” is one of the most famous work written by Elizabeth Bowen and it was published in 1945 as part of the writer’s collection ‘The Demon Lover, and Other Stories’. As the other short stories in her book, the author focuses her attention and the plots of her stories around a series of sorrowful events all set during the World War II. ‘The Demon Lover’ narrates the story of a married woman who goes back to her home in London which had been abandoned many years earlier by her and her family during the German attack. Eventually the protagonist decides to return to her homeplace and realizes she has been haunting by the ghost of her first lover, a soldier which she thought to be dead in the previous world war. A series of paranormal

Even though the short story was written in the first half of the 20th century, in fact, its story line and the language used makes this piecework quite contemporary and accessible to anyone. One of the themes touched by Bowen in her work is the depiction of the human mind during the world war; the main character in fact, is portrayed as a middle-aged woman who is still suffering from the psychological traumas that she experienced in her youth and who is unable to move on with her life. Although many years have passed, she seems to remember everything that happened to her when she was young, everything except the face of her first love, which is also the same man who is hunting her in the present. The author herself worked as an air-raid responsible during the world war II and certainly experienced all the stress and the fear that people were feeling at the time and perhaps there could be some kind of connection between the protagonist and the writer: they are both women uncapable to deal with the effects of emotional traumas and hence are haunted by their past