Gardiner-Scott is an Associate Professor at Mount Ida College. In the following essay, she examines and discusses various critical examinations of "The Demon Lover."

The title of Bowen's best-known story, "The Demon Lover," refers to a Gothic ballad whose plot "focuses on a young woman's promise to love her young man for ever and await his return from battle," according to Charles E. May. After her beloved fails to return from battle (the legend goes) she marries someone else—only to have the soldier-lover show up, often at the wedding in the guise of a skeletonized corpse, to claim her and carry her away to be united with him in death. "The Demon Lover" is a variation on this theme, being at once a ghost story and a story about a woman's precarious mental state in wartime.

A historical perspective related to warfare in the twentieth...