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The writings of Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) contain some of the most evocative depictions of a London made ghostly by the second world war. As she wrote in her 1949 novel capturing the disorientation of civilian life during the Blitz, The Heat of the Day , “[t]he wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned”. The structure of lives, daily routines and seemingly solid buildings could all break down overnight.

Born in Dublin, Bowen divided her time between Britain and her family house Bowen’s Court in County Cork, and during the war wrote confidential reports on Irish neutrality for the Ministry of Information. Her knowledge of espionage, dislocation and wartime secrecy is reflected in The Heat of the Day ’s uneasy relationship between Stella Rodney and suspected spy Robert Kelway. Their romance unfolds in a shadowy, increasingly unreal-feeling city, where “[o]ut of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter”.

The Demon Lover and Other Stories , published in 1945, focuses on the potential for the supernatural and the uncanny in wartime London, when—as Bowen’s prologue puts it—everyone lived in a collective “state of lucid abnormality”. Her tales relate haunting encounters in bomb-damaged streets and squares, from “Mysterious Kôr’s” account of a girl’s moonlit walk with her soldier lover to “The Happy Autumn Fields”’ dreamlike fusion of blacked-out London and agrarian Ireland. “The Demon Lover” itself follows the plot of a traditional Scottish ballad of the same name, in which a married woman’s long-dead fiancé returns to reclaim what he sees as his rightful prize. In Bowen’s hands, a Kensington house on a humid August afternoon becomes the scene of an increasingly frightening reckoning with the past.