When Enid Bagnold 's first play, Lottie Dundass, opened at the Vaudeville Theatre in London in the summer of 1943, its author was fifty-three with a twenty-five-year career as novelist behind her. T...
Read more
Enid Bagnold was the only daughter--and for the first six years of her life the only child--of Arthur Henry Bagnold and Ethel Alger Bagnold. Bagnold admits that her parents doted on her as a child: "Y...
Read more
Enid Bagnold's artistic life began, she says in her Autobiography: From 1889 (1969), when she and her family moved to Jamaica. "Beauty never hit me until I was nine. . . . This was the first page of m...
Read more
Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden was the most commercially successful play in Great Britain in 1956, the year of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, but in many ways Bagnold's form of theater belongs t...
Read more
Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
The devastated areas would strike most people as a singularly unpromising scene in which to place an idyll, yet Miss Enid Bagnold has performed this fea...
Read more
Critical Essay by Rosemary Benet
Readers who complain that the shadow of futility and frustration hangs over the modern novel, should read "The Door of Life". Here is no wishy-washy inhi...
Read more
Critical Essay by Leo Lerman
Miss Bagnold's special talent has ever been the telling of stories set in the milieu which she seems to know best; and this milieu has several faces. One is that of...
Read more
Critical Essay by Anthony West
[Insofar as "The Loved and Envied"] is about people and emotions, it is a very good book…. "Serena Blandish," [Miss Bagnold's s...
Read more
Critical Essay by Robert Kee
The central character of [Enid Bagnold's The Loved and Envied] is Lady Ruby Maclean, a beautiful, rich, 33-year-old Parisian socialite, who "for a quarter of...
Read more
Critical Essay by Brooks Atkinson
Enid Bagnold is "the lady of quality" who once wrote a novel from which S. N. Behrman wrote a drama of quality, "Serena Blandish." It was ...
Read more
Critical Essay by Walter Kerr
I find myself touched by "The Chinese Prime Minister" and I don't think it is because [the play is] … about the end of things coming so soon a...
Read more
Critical Essay by Howard Taubman
Grow old along with Enid Bagnold. The last of life, like the first of it, is full of crotchets and ironies as she contemplates both parts in "The Chinese Prime ...
Read more
Critical Essay by Katherine Mansfield
If Miss Bagnold had chosen that her heroine [in 'The Happy Foreigner'] should lead the most sheltered and protected life that is left for a young wo...
Read more
Critical Essay by Robert Brustein
A play about old age should not itself be tired, but the writing in The Chinese Prime Minister is sometimes more enfeebled than its subject matter. Enid Bagnold, I am...
Read more
Critical Essay by Nora Sayre
Almost everyone's childhood is boring—except one's own and Enid Bagnold's. At 80, she has written a splendid memoir ["Enid Bagnold...
Read more
Critical Essay by Martin Gottfried
It is not often these days that a play is written with grace in pursuit of intelligence. Both seem out of fashion. "A Matter of Gravity" … is ha...
Read more
Critical Essay by Clive Barnes
They say that to understand is to forgive, but I am not sure that I understood Enid Bagnold's new play "A Matter of Gravity."…
An eccentric E...
Read more
Critical Essay by Alan Rich
[A Matter of Gravity] is not so much a play … as a series of patches from several plays that connect only in having the same cast in each. One patch concerns an elde...
Read more
Critical Essay by The Spectator
The Happy Foreigner is quite as ingenious as A Diary Without Dates, and has none of the qualities that made that book so curiously detestable. Miss Bagnold has still th...
Read more
Critical Essay by Christopher Morley
[In "The Door of Life"] Enid Bagnold gives us, with candor and subtlety, an inward-gazing study of the companionship between a woman and her child, i...
Read more
Enid Bagnold
Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
