Elizabeth Bowen Society Reading Group - The Demon Lover

The Elizabeth Bowen Society invites you to join our online reading group on Wednesday, 26 November 2025, where we’ll explore The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945), a collection in which Bowen’s eerie precision of mood and wartime undercurrents meet in short fiction at full power. Writing in The New Statesman in 1945, Henry Reed praised Bowen's “ability to concentrate the emotions of a scene, or a sequence of thoughts … into an unforgettable sentence or phrase with a beauty of expression.” The stories in this collection are unsettling, elegant, and impossible to forget. They reveal Bowen at her sharpest.

The stories in this collection are:

• In the Square
• Sunday Afternoon
• The Inherited Clock
• The Cheery Soul
• Songs My Father Sang Me
• The Demon Lover
• Careless Talk
• The Happy Autumn Fields
• Ivy Gripped the Steps
• Pink May
• Green Holly
• Mysterious Kôr