The Death of The Heart

Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart follows sixteen-year-old Portia Quayne as she experiences love, betrayal, and loss of innocence in 1930s London. The book jacket design translates this emotional tension through a sculpted heart wrapped in barbed wire and surrounded by roses—symbols of beauty, pain, and restraint. The sharp contrast between softness and tension reflects Bowen’s themes of vulnerability, disillusionment, and the guarded strength that follows heartbreak.