'Souls Astray' in the Ruins of a Blitzed London: Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day

The Blitz and World War II deeply affected people’s lives due to the dispossession of material things, leading to identity loss. Elizabeth Bowen is an Anglo-Irish writer who played a crucial role during World War II, both in her work for the Ministry of Information and as a writer narrating the horrors of the war. This dissertation aims to analyse her wartime novel The Heat of the Day (1948), a post-war novel which allowed the author to gain a thorough understanding of what had happened during the conflict. This study explores the literary movement that influenced Bowen’s writing, her hyphenated identity and her wartime years between London and Eire. I examine the characters’ identities, along with the parallelisms that link Bowen to her own fictional creations; particular attention is indeed dedicated to the novel’s context, the centrality of women’s roles in the story and the domestic spaces that haunt these characters.