Writing for the cinema allows Mrs. Jhabvala to reach a far larger audience than she could ever have thought it possible (before 1975) to reach with her novels and stories. A concern to strip life of its illusions seems to motivate her films and fiction alike during the period under review [1960–1976], and it is evident that she often works out in her films ideas that run as major themes through her fiction. Asked in 1975 to comment on the influence of film-making on her writing of fiction, she referred to a "personal influence":

The films allowed me to travel a lot more and meet a great many people of all different types. You must have noticed that my early books were all set in Delhi but later on I do branch out and travel. That is entirely due to film.

It is certainly true that the fiction written after 1960 ranges...