Mrs. Drover has left her home in London, and not by choice.
II.
Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon Lover" is set during the period of the second World War. The bombing has displaced the Drovers to the English country, from their home in a "quiet, arboreal part of Kensington". <1> When Mrs. Drover returns alone to visit her house, in the "once familiar street...an unfamiliar queerness had silted up". She finds a letter.
The letter concerns a promise she had made a generation earlier, to a soldier fiance who then went missing in the first World War. Reminded now in writing of that long-ago "sinister troth", Mrs. Drover's shock has its effects: "her lips, beneath the remains of the lipstick, beginning to go white".
After losing her fiance, Kathleen had drifted into her early thirties before being courted by William Drover. Marriage and children followed, making a home of "years on years of voices, habits and steps". The letter threatens undoing memory "with one white burning blank" of that fiance: "under no conditions could she remember his face." The implication is not lost on Mrs. Drover. "So, wherever he may be waiting, I shall not know him. You have no time to run from a face you do not expect."
III.
We become invested in our homes. Kathleen Drover also has much at stake by keeping her past at a benign distance. The experience of living through a second World War has forced her from home, and with it, her investment of emotional safety and equilibrium.
IV.
Through allusion and evocative detail, Elizabeth Bowen builds an atmosphere of uncanny dread, of increasing anxiety in "The Demon Lover". The story's high note, of fear and horror, strikes in a taxi. "Mrs. Drover's mouth hung open for some seconds before she could issue her first scream. After that she continued to scream freely...as the taxi, accelerating without mercy, made off with her into the hinterland of deserted streets." Home nowhere in sight.
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<1>Bowen, Elizabeth. "The Demon Lover". Elements Of Fiction (3rd Canadian Edition, 1994). Edited by Robert Scholes and Rosemary Sullivan.
