A World of Love was published by Jonathan Cape in 1955. Montefort is a decaying Big House in County Cork (Bowen’s habitual territory) shared uneasily by two women: Antonia, who inherited it, and Lilia, who married the wrong man and is trapped there. Both women loved Guy — Antonia’s cousin, killed in 1918. Antonia never married; Lilia married Fred (Guy’s illegitimate cousin) as a substitute. Fred works the failing farm. The household exists in suspended resentment.
Jane, Lilia’s twenty-year-old daughter, finds a cache of Guy’s love letters in an attic. The letters are passionate, specific — but their addressee is unclear. Were they to Antonia? To Lilia? To someone else entirely? The discovery reopens the household’s frozen emotional landscape: old jealousies flare, old loves are relitigated, and Jane — who never knew Guy — finds herself falling in love with a ghost.
The novel is Bowen’s most compressed and poetic work — barely 200 pages, written in a heightened, allusive prose that some critics found obscure and others found her most achieved style. It examines how the dead hold power over the living — how a man killed at twenty-three can dominate the emotional lives of women forty years later.
Collecting A World of Love
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1955): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $80–$200
- US first (Knopf): $40–$100