Although Viola Meynell is best remembered as the author of two books of memoirs about her parents, she was also an accomplished novelist and short-story writer. Her novels are usually realistic psychological studies that gradually lead her characters up to a moral or spiritual epiphany. Events in her novels subtly suggest the interpenetration of the divine and the everyday, a theme that gives her work a surprisingly powerful impact.

Viola Mary Gertrude Meynell was born in London on 15 October 1885. She was the third daughter and the fifth of eight children born to Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, and she grew up in a home dominated by writing--her mother was a poet and essayist, and her father was a journalist and editor. In her 1929 memoir of her mother, Meynell recalls the children playing below the table on which the parents worked, producing their own newspaper while the adults worked frantically...