This paper examines how Elizabeth Bowen explores both the failure of hospitality and its enduring potential to foster forms of connection among marginalized figures, marked as “other” from dominant political and social perspectives. Focusing on “The Cheery Soul,” one of Bowen’s wartime short stories, this paper argues that the story exposes the realities of wartime Britain, where ideals of hospitality break down amid a social landscape reshaped by wartime regulations and shifting public attitudes. Through Gothic conventions, a brief analepsis, deliberately awkward syntax, and disorienting paragraph openings, Bowen traces the narrator’s growing recognition of the limits of conventional hospitality and of their own vulnerability to the wartime state’s suspicion and exclusion. The story ultimately signals the possibility of a more ethical openness to those marginalized by dominant wartime social and political norms.