The ability to recreate detail, to capture the nuances of everyday conversation, to recognize humor in the trivialities of middle-class life marks the dramas of Dodie Smith. Her critics sometimes found fault with what they considered her superficiality, but most admitted that her plays provided enjoyable entertainment. The public agreed, making Dodie Smith one of the few successful women dramatists in England and America during the first half of the twentieth century.

Born in Whitefield, Lancashire, Dorothy Gladys Smith was only eighteen months old when her father, Ernest Smith, died at the age of thirty. She and her mother, Ella Furber Smith, moved after his death to Old Trafford, a suburb of Manchester, to reside with Ella Smith's parents, William and Margaret Furber. Her association with her mother's family had an important influence on Dodie Smith's choice of a career,

In Look Back with Love (1974), the first volume...