Best known in England for her germinal feminist study Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society (1970), Eva Figes is the author of several novels that explore new methods of representing human experience. Although she considers herself a European rather than an English writer, her concern with reshaping the form and content of the conventional realist novel aligns her with the generation of British experimental novelists of the 1960s and 1970s. Figes's personal history as a child refugee from the Holocaust informs her recurrent interest both in the meaning of language and in figures who are haunted, marginalized, and unsure of their identities. She places particular emphasis on the quotidian experience and inner life of women, both contemporary and historical, and frequently plays with the boundaries between fact and fiction, poetry and prose.

Eva Unger was born in Berlin on 15 April 1932, the elder child and only daughter of Emil Eduard Unger...