SOURCE: "Elizabeth Bowen's The Demon Lover': Psychosis or Seduction," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 4, Fall, 1980, pp. 483-87.

In the essay below, Fraustino develops arguments against Douglas A. Hughes's assessment of "The Demon Lover" as a "psychological delusion," maintaining that this story is intended to be read as a "mystery of high suspense."

In a major article ["Cracks in the Psyche: Elizabeth Bowen's 'The Demon Lover'," Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 10, 1973] on Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon Lover," Douglass A. Hughes dismisses the popular ghost-story interpretation and advances his own psychological one. The story, he says, is "a masterful dramatization of acute psychological delusion, of the culmination of paranoia in a time of war. . . . War, not a vengeful lover, is the demon that overwhelms this rueful woman." To support his argument, Hughes maintains that "the narrator subtly but clearly indicates why the forty-four year-old woman suddenly loses her...