Enid Bagnold was the only daughter--and for the first six years of her life the only child--of Arthur Henry Bagnold and Ethel Alger Bagnold. Bagnold admits that her parents doted on her as a child: "You'd have thought I was the Infant Jesus," she wrote in her Autobiography: From 1889 (1969). When Bagnold was nine years old, her father, a major in the Royal Engineers, received a command in Jamaica, and the family left England. "The tropic leapt into the spangled night," she recalled. "This was the first page of my life as someone who can see. It was like a man idly staring at a field suddenly finding he had Picasso's eyes." Her three years in Jamaica, although surrounded by beauty, were lonely; she had no friends. The army doctor's daughter, Mary Adams, studied with her, but she had to go home promptly, because Mary's father thought Enid was...