It is set in France and Great Britain following World War I, and its action takes place on a single February day in a house in Paris.

The middle section of the book ("The Past") is an imagined chronicle of part of the life of Leopold's mother, Karen Michaelis, revealing the background to the events that occur in Mme Fisher's home on the day.

"[1] Bowen revisits themes and structures familiar from her earlier novels; the tri-partite structure and the ten-year gap between past and present, for instance, had been used earlier in Friends and Relations, but unlike that novel, The House in Paris finds an escape from a tragic past, by way of a "magical child of myths, an archetypal redeemer.

The tone of the letter is manipulative: Mrs. Arbuthnot subtly chastises Miss Fisher for not visiting her, all the while asking that Henrietta be allowed to spend the day in Paris.

As Miss Fisher sits knitting, her mother and the young girl converse, Mme Fisher frequently critiquing her daughter, commenting on her own bad health, and, ultimately, discussing Leopold: Henrietta learns that Leopold's now-dead father at one time broke her daughter's heart.

Karen Michaelis, ten years or so before the day of the previous section, is sailing from her native England to visit her Aunt Violet and Uncle Bill Bent at Rushbrook, County Cork, Ireland.

Afterward, Karen resigns herself to her upcoming marriage, but before too long, the Michaelis family receives news of Aunt Violet's death, and once again things are in a state of disorder.

"[12] At the end of the section, Karen reveals to Naomi that she is pregnant with Max's child, and will leave for Germany to try to avoid any scandal.

She attempts to explain Karen's unique nature to the disconsolate boy, abandoning any of those delicacies requested in Marian Grant Moody's earlier letter.

She explains Leopold his history, including the details of his birth, the death of his half-sibling, his adoption, and his general displacement in the world.

Ultimately, Ray and Leopold leave the house together, dropping off Henrietta at the train station on the way; the two children say their goodbyes and head off in different directions.

Marian Kelly sees Bowen's narrative structure deliberately slowing down her plot: "the middle section moves backward and so produces a stasis that interrupts the forward momentum of the text".

[16] In the past, Karen for years maintained an unrequited, hopeless love for Max, but when they finally became involved, she could not enjoy a fulfilling relationship with him.

[17] In the more recent present, Mme Fisher has been putting off the sale of her Parisian house until her death, although she acknowledges that she has been waiting to die for nearly a decade.

Also, the reader learns that Leopold's development and maturity have been continuously stunted by his adoptive family, who have kept him in a state of perpetual dependency.

"[21] Because of Karen's betrayal of Leopold, Bennett and Royle qualified The House in Paris as "Bowen's most rigorous and unremittingly clairvoyant elaboration of the structure and effects of psychic trauma.

"[22] Finally, Ray betrays the Grant Moody foster family by stealing Leopold at the novel's close.

There is so much secrecy throughout the text that, according to Marian Kelly, "Bowen forces readers into the position of detective by making constant deduction at the level of both conversational references and character psychology a central element of reading her novel".

In the past Max recalled of Mme Fisher, "she acted on me like acid on a plate,"[24] while Karen thought, "She is a woman who sells girls; she is a witch.

"[26] In fact, Neil Corcoran sees Mme Fisher as "quasi-vampiric," since she "does indeed draw blood from Max, when he slits his wrist in the house in front of her.

"[28] At one point, Karen was aware that her mother's passive-aggressive parenting caused a key power shift between them: "She has made me lie for a week.

"[29] Aware of these troubling examples, in the present Karen longs to correct her abandonment and be a "natural mother"[30] to Leopold, but her son realises that "she would not lend herself to him.

"[31] Neil Corcoran calls Leopold's reaction to his mother's failure "the novel's most concentrated expression of the psychological and emotional wounding that is parentlessness.

"[32] Bowen's attention to motherhood continues throughout her oeuvre, attending to difficult maternal figures like Mrs. Kelway in The Heat of the Day and Lady Naylor in The Last September, for example.

[35] Bowen's writing style frequently involves a slow pace that builds to a crescendo, and a usage of free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness.