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Death of the Heart
  
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Death of the Heart (Hardcover)

by Elizabeth Bowen (Author)
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 384 pages
  • Publisher: Jonathan Cape; Uniform Ed edition (Dec 1948)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0224600524
  • ISBN-13: 978-0224600521
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,236,820 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

5 Reviews
5 star:
 (1)
4 star:
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3 star:    (0)
2 star:
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Average Customer Review
3.8 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A superb, moving novel, 22 Nov 2002
This review is from: The Death of the Heart (Vintage classics) (Paperback)
Elizabeth Bowen could produce page-turners worthy of the best
commercial novelists, but she had a knack of making the most of
the apparently ordinary. This story of a young girl's courtship and the small betrayals which lead to the 'death of the heart' is totally engrossing and moving. It had me reading into the night with an unidentifiable sense of dread and it left me in tears.
A superb novel.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent, breath-taking read!!, 28 Nov 1996
By A Customer
This review is from: The Death of the Heart (Twentieth Century Classics) (Paperback)
Although not of the same era, Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart brings to mind the work of Jane Austen. This literary masterpiece, written in the Modern Period (during or immediately after World War I), centers around an adolescent girl's "coming of age" in an era of many questions and precious few answers. The brilliance of this novel is the linking of the familiar novel format to a Virginia Woolf-like stream of conciousness style of writing. I've recommended this book to many a bibliophile and never have had it fail to make an impact on the reader.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Not My Cup of Tea at All, 23 Jan 2009
By A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Death of the Heart (Vintage classics) (Paperback)
I have to admit that I read this critically acclaimed novel under some duress -- it was picked for my book group on the basis that it is one of our member's writing professor's favorite book. (It's also on the Modern Library and Time Magazine lists of Top 100 Novels, for whatever that's worth.) Unfortunately, I tend to like books with plots, and this is certainly not that -- it's more of a psychological portrait of a teenage girl as she undergoes the process of having her "innocence" utterly revoked by the social milieu she is thrust into.

Portia is a 16-year-old orphan sent to live with her half-brother and his cold and catty wife in their lovely Regency Park-fronting home in 1930s London. Having been raised in a succession of continental hotels (an experience Bowen herself had for about a decade, starting at age 12), she is wholly unprepared for the invisible and unspoken rules of the game operating in the upper-class English home she's entered. With her distant half-brother and cold sister-in-law, she struggles to locate some kind of human connection, and only manages to find it in unsuitable people such as an older head servant, or a dissolute young male "friend" of her sister-in-law (he's apparently based on the Welsh writer Goronwy Rees).

It is this latter relationship that inevitably leads to tears at the end, as her naive dreams are dashed by the self-absorption of everyone around her. It's all pretty bleak stuff, as there is not a single character in the book who lives in anything approaching happiness. It does have some appeal as a fictional ethnographic case study of a strange bygone (and peculiarly English) ecosystem, but it's hard not to wish for World War II to arrive and force these characters into doing something useful and thinking about something other than themselves.

Although it's not a book I can imagine recommending to many people, it is worth checking out if you're the kind of reader who likes to linger over every sentence, picking it up, turning it around, and examining it from every angle. The language is rich enough to warrant this kind of close reading -- even if it didn't generally strike a chord with me. It's also worth reading by anyone with an interest in the interwar era or in the manifestation of class in Britain at the time. Note: The novel was adapted as a miniseries for BBC television in 1985, however this version remains unavailable on DVD.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Innocence and Experience
Following the death of her parents, the sixteen-year-old Portia Quayne comes to live with her older half-brother Thomas and his wife Anna. Read more
Published 7 months ago by J C E Hitchcock

4.0 out of 5 stars Great read
Having just moved to London, I loved how much the city infuses this moody jewel of a novel. It's definitely of its time, but anyone who has survived the depths and heights of... Read more
Published on 23 Feb 2004 by girlwonder_uk

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