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 to a generation eclipsed by the changes wrought by...

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. The next twenty-three years she would devote to the...

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: "You'd have thought I was the Infant Jesus," she wrote...

Yancey, Enid A. Of Milwaukee entered in the fullness of eternal life on September 15, 2004 at the age of 89. She was born July 29, 1915, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the second daughter of Clarence and Ethel (nee Reed) Marshall. Raised in a...

In 1984, an owlish Democratic public relations wizard named Francis O'Brien invented the marathon press conference for the woman politico with sticky questions about her spouse's financial dealings. For 90 minutes, on a hot August day, Geraldine Ferraro answered every conceivable formulation about the...

[Insofar as "The Loved and Envied"] is about people and emotions, it is a very good book…. "Serena Blandish," [Miss Bagnold's second novel, was] an extraordinarily exact, lucid, and, in a wholly feminine way, strong account of the experiences that turn a girl into a woman. It was a brilliant start, which promised at least an English Colette. What followed, however, was a long silence, broken, finally, by ["National Velvet,"] an agreeable middle-brow co...

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 after they have just begun. I am touched, I think, because I have seen one whole play in which there is not a single careless line. There are careless scenes, oh, yes. Quite a large portion of the middle act is taken up with a crossfire of family quarreling that has as its purpose the badgering of [the main character] until [she] is pushed i...

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 hardly in the class of her wonderful "The Chalk Garden," or the lesser "The Chinese Prime Minister," but time spent with even an untidy Enid Bagnold play is time spent in the company of intellectual finesse…. ["A Matter of Gravity"] is about a very rich, very aristocratic and devastatingly bright ol...