Critics have responded to The Death of the Heart primarily in two ways: by discussing the implications of the author's childhood experiences vis-àvis the motherless outsider in the novel; and by examining the conflict between innocence and experience threaded throughout the book.

Bowen grew up in a privileged Anglo-Irish family in Ireland, not really English but isolated by her English ties from the country in which she lived. According to Martha Henn in Feminist Writers, "she occupied a class position that put her at odds with most of her fellow Irish." As Richard Tillinghast notes in "The House, the Hotel, & the Child," "the Anglo-Irish were always, from the sixteenth century on, to some degree rootless and insecure in the country they governed." This tension is due to the fact that the Protestant ruling class owned land taken by force from the Irish Catholic population...