With characteristic forthrightness, Flora Annie Webster Steel begins her autobiography, The Garden of Fidelity (1929), with the words "Of course I was born; everyone is." She then proceeds to detail for her reader the far more interesting facts of her conception. The event involved an "autocratic mother-in-law, an equally autocratic husband, and an heiress wife who ought to have had control over her own money." Flora was the result of what was apparently an uneasy truce between her parents after her father's "voluntary cessation of marital relations" apparently succeeded in subduing her heiress mother. Whether or not her parents' sex life had anything to do with what Flora terms her "inborn dislike to the sensual side of life" is difficult to say. Far more certain is the influence this story and the Webster domestic scene had on her writing. Although Flora Steel is and was known best as one...