How I Finally Lost My Heart by Doris Lessing

First published: 1963

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: The mid-twentieth century

Locale: London

Principal Character:

• The protagonist, an anonymous English woman in her forties

The Story

In this first-person narrative, an anonymous woman in mid-life reflects on her life and loves and recounts an experience that she has recently had, the experience of losing her heart. She loses her heart neither in the romantic metaphorical sense of being powerless before desire for another nor in the literal sense of cutting her heart out of her body and throwing it away, not that she has not wished to do both in her life. She loses her heart in a transfiguring, dreamlike encounter with her own inner being.

In the narrator's ruminations on her past loves, she distinguishes between the affairs and entanglements and even marriages, however numerous, that "don't really count" and "serious loves." She points out that not only she, but also most people today, fly from lover to lover, ever seeking "serious" love. Acerbically, she observes, "We are all entirely in agreement that we are in the right to taste, test, sip and sample a thousand people on our way to the 'real' one." Although she carries the scars of many loves, she has never lost her heart.

The occasion that precipitates her finally losing her heart takes place on a day on which she lunches with her first "real" love, a man she terms "serious love A." By chance that same afternoon she has tea with another past love, serious love B. Meeting these two loves "that count" and anticipating a meeting with a new man that evening engender in her a startling insight into the nature of her affairs of heart. Standing at a window looking out on Great Portland Street, ready for an evening with the man who might be serious love C, she has a vision of the dynamics of her romantic life. She imagines C, too, standing in his window, anticipating their meeting, hoping like her to be able to give his wounded heart to another. She imagines calling C and asking him to agree that they should keep their wounded hearts to themselves, not hurl them at one another. Her fancied appeal to C is interrupted by an awareness that a large, unknown object has appeared in her left hand. She recognizes this unknown object as her own heart.

She is in turn irritated, appalled, and a bit disgusted by the heart in her hand, but soon enough the problem it presents is clear. How will she get rid of it? Unable to pull the heart off and throw it away, she cancels her date with the man who might be serious love C and sits for four days examining the layers of memory in her forty-year-old heart. She is struck by the realization that examining her heart and its memories will affix her heart to her hand permanently. Freeing herself of her heart will require more than introspection.

Concealing her heart on her hand first in tinfoil, then in a scarf, she moves out on the street and into the London subway system. Sitting unnoticed in a crowded train, she observes a young, rather shabby woman. The woman sits in a twisted posture, stares at nothing, talks to herself in a "private drama of misery" over some betrayal of love. The narrator describes her as absorbed in a "frozen misery," a "passionless passion."

As she stares at this stricken shell of a woman, the narrator suddenly feels the heart in her hand roll loose. She stands and places the heart wrapped in its tinfoil on the seat next to the woman, like a poignant valentine. The grieving woman clutches it to herself as if it were a precious gift, a gift that compensated for all of her pain. The narrator rises and leaves the underground, laughing. Heartless, she is free.