The Heat of the Day was published by Jonathan Cape in 1949. Set in London during the Blitz (1942–1944), the novel follows Stella Rodney, an attractive widow working in a government office, who is approached by Harrison — a man she finds physically repulsive — with devastating information: her lover Robert Kelway is passing military secrets to Nazi Germany. Harrison offers a bargain: if Stella sleeps with him, he will not report Robert.
The novel operates on multiple levels of betrayal: Robert betraying England, Harrison using state power to coerce sex, Stella betraying Robert by investigating him (she goes to his family’s country house and discovers the emotional wasteland that produced his nihilism), and England itself — a society whose class system and emotional frigidity bred the very disaffection that produces traitors.
Bowen wrote from personal experience: she worked for the Ministry of Information during the war and had affairs that paralleled (in emotional if not political terms) the triangulations of the novel. Her London Blitz is the most literary evocation of wartime existence — not the bombs themselves but the strange heightening of emotion, the sense that ordinary moral rules have been suspended by extremity.
Collecting The Heat of the Day
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1949): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $200–$500
- Very good in jacket: $80–$200
- US first (Knopf): $60–$150