The Demon Lover by Elizabeth Bowen

The story "The Demon lover" by Elizabeth Bowen can represent both a ghost and pshychological drama story. Mentally the story is a pshycholigical drama. It is filled with many delusions of past memories that still haunted Mrs. Kathleen Drover. She confuses herself between World War II with World War I because of remembering the overwhelming events of both wars. Due to the confusion, when Mrs. Drover returns to her old home after a recent bombing she begins to think about her long-dead fiance, and a series of events occur during that visit.

"On the supernatural side of the letter's enterance she was not permitting her mind to dwell." Yet Mrs. Drover did dwell on the question of how the letter got in the house. Going over in her head many times that the caretaker could have left the letter there didnt add up because she knew the caretaker would send the letter to her new house not knowing Mrs. Drover would return back to London. "..for two or three seconds shutting her eyes, told herself that she had imagined the letter." She wanted the letter to be a fragment of her imagination and wished it wasnt real. When she opened her eyes the letter was still there. Part of her mind made her overly think how the letter got in the deserted house and put her at a mild mental state.

Mrs. Drover couldnt stop thinking about her dead-ex fiance before she was about to leave the house. Not thinking about how great of a man he was or how much she cared about him, but the thoughts of his personality and ways. "He was never kind to me, not really." She doesn't remember him as a kind man and not very considerate of her either. As she thought about him more, she realized that he was only set on her, didnt love her, but was only set on her. This may not affect her greatly and or very emotionally, but deep in her heart somewhere it made a little dent.

The fact that Mrs. Drover was thinking about her long-dead finace after many years of not seeing him or hearing from him, it emotionally affected her. Her thoughts all started from the letter that was found on the table. Along with confusion as to why the letter was signed with her initial K but was to Kathleen herself didnt make any sense to her. Which put her uneasy. The prime examples of the letter and how it got into the house and also her personal thoughts about her past shows that "The Demon Lover" is both a ghost and psychological drama.