The Demon Lover

Content Warning: This section mentions wartime violence, relationship abuse, sexuality, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and demon possession.

Mrs. Kathleen Drover is a 44-year-old woman who is married to Mr. William Drover. The couple has been married for 12 years and has three sons. Due to the blitz, the family has relocated to the countryside, but they previously lived in Kensington, a residential neighborhood. Mrs. Drover believes that her “utter dependability [is] the keystone of her family life” (664), so she is acutely aware of the possibility of that life falling apart. Implicitly, she also seems to recognize that she may not be as “dependable” as she would like, commenting on the “intermittent muscular flicker to the left of her mouth” that she developed after the birth of one of her sons (662).

Mrs. Drover does not want to go back to the time when she felt the most vulnerable: 25 years ago, at the end of World War I. In a flashback, it emerges that when she was 19, she was engaged to a young soldier. This relationship made her feel as if her very “existence” was on hold. She remembers that the soldier was insistent, intimidating, and knowingly caused a cut on her hand.