The Demon Lover and Other Stories was published by Jonathan Cape in 1945 (US title: Ivy Gripped the Steps). The collection contains Bowen’s finest short fiction, all written during or about the London Blitz.
The title story is one of the greatest ghost stories in English: Mrs. Drover returns to her boarded-up London house to collect some belongings and finds a letter on the hall table — addressed to her in a hand she recognizes. It is from her fiancé, a soldier reported killed in 1916, confirming a “promise” he extracted from her twenty-five years ago: that she would be waiting for him on this date. The story’s final image — Mrs. Drover trapped in a taxi with a driver whose face she cannot see — achieves genuine terror through absolute restraint.
Other landmarks in the collection include “Mysterious Kôr” (two women and a soldier wander through moonlit, bombed London, which resembles a dead city from H. Rider Haggard), “The Happy Autumn Fields” (a woman in a bombed house reads a Victorian diary and begins to live in both times simultaneously), and “Sunday Afternoon” (Anglo-Irish neutrality during the war distilled into a single social gathering).
Collecting The Demon Lover
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1945): Boards with dust jacket. Wartime printing on economy paper.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $150–$400
- Very good in jacket: $60–$150