Elizabeth Bowen wrote her best stories during the 1939–45 War. None of them are conventional war-stories, but in most of them the effects of war are present, the material effects of bombs on buildings and also the effects on people's behaviour of their feelings of fear, frustration, hope, boredom and despair….

In The Demon Lover Elizabeth Bowen took on one of the most difficult tasks a writer can attempt: to make the supernatural credible. The results establish her, in my view, as one of the finest storytellers in the last 50 years and more than make up for her deficiencies as a novelist. In these stories she uses the wartime atmosphere, in particular of bombed and battered houses in London, to merge dreams with waking life, the world of ghosts with that of furniture-movers and taxi-drivers. In 'The Happy Autumn Fields' she persuades us to believe that Mary, ignoring the...