Gillian Avery seems always to have felt more at home with the Victorians than with her twentieth--century contemporaries, and indeed, few modern writers bring the Victorian period to life more vividly than she. Avery was born in Reigate, Surrey, on 30 September 1926, the daughter of an estate agent, Norman Bates Avery, and his wife, the former Grace Elise Dunn. She was educated in Reigate at Dunottar School, and she depicts her childhood as rather intellectually deprived. She was always a voracious reader, but books were a precious commodity. In an unpublished letter she recalls: "There was in effect no public library in the small Surrey town where I grew up (just a dingy reference library, open for a few hours a week, in a room above the public lavatories. We never went there, and wouldn't have been allowed to use it because of 'germs.'" Her interest in things...