ABSTRACT

Elizabeth Bowen’s 1948 novel The Heat of the Day has two simultaneous plotlines: one, a “romance,” where the woman tries to help her spy-lover escape in defiance of British legal, military, and diplomatic authorities, and the other, a “spy novel”—less evident-, where she kills him.1 The novel uses the conventions of both genres, but incompletely-Stella and Robert Kelway contemplate marriage but never marry, while the content and intrigue of Robert’s secret negotiations with the Nazis are quite marginal to the text, more philosophical teaser than narratologically committed.