The Demon Lover Critical Essay | Critical Review by Hugh Bradenham

Critical Review by Hugh Bradenham

A review of "The Demon Lover," in Life and Letters, Vol. 47, No. 100, 1945, pp. 216-18.

In the following review, Bradenham comments on the themes of war and the supernatural in the stories of The Demon Lover.

Why should such a writer as Miss Bowen welcome to her stories the bomb and the ghost—sometimes both together within the compass of a few pages—visitors from another world or from the upper air whose normal purpose in fiction is to bring about crude changes in a melodramatic plot? For the extremes of experience, the worst fears of all, the terrors that Shakespeare would not allow Hamlet's father to describe and Picasso could only illustrate by abstract and recondite symbols, should surely not appeal to a writer who carries, quite rightly, her delicacy of perception far beyond common sense and needs no more stimulus to acute feeling than a careless gesture at...
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