Nina Bawden is perhaps best known for her incisive satirical inquiry into the family relationships of the educated middle class. Less well-known is the fact that she began her career as a writer of two elegantly plotted murder stories, and then worked her way through several other varieties of the novel, including the gothic romance, the Bildungsroman, and the horror story. Since these early talented formal explorations, she has moved toward the psychological investigation of modern middle-class existence. With an urbane irony and often surprising violence, she exposes the uneasy alliances which keep chaos at bay and provides a circumstantial account of the domesticated brutality at the heart of modern life.

Bawden was born in London in 1925. She spent her childhood there until the outbreak of World War II when she was evacuated and lived in a South Wales mining village and in a farmhouse in Shropshire. At...