Janet Burroway is a writer of wide range and many voices. In part because she has consciously avoided current trends, and in part because she lived abroad for eleven years, during which time her first four novels were published, her reputation has only recently begun to catch up with the consistently high quality of her work. Burroway's themes are universal--love, death, the implications of choice, human culpability--and in the broadest sense, her novels are profoundly moral. She creates a determinedly realistic world, a comédie humaine with tragic implications, where evil is most often the result of blindness.

Born in Tucson, Arizona, and raised in Phoenix, Burroway began writing early, evincing enough talent even in elementary school that one teacher began tutoring her after school in poetry. After a year of study (1954-1955) at the University of Arizona, she entered Mademoiselle's College Board contest--which Sylvia Plath had...