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 Osborne and his generation. Her sharp, witty, epigrammatic style harks back to the prewar West End and the well-made plays of the 1920s and 1930s. In its representation of class and gender if not in its form of audience address, however, Bagnold's work is remarkably modern. Her plays feature women who are independent and, as Lenemaja Friedman asserts, "sexually emancipated"; certainly her female characters do not conform to conventions of family life. While her male characters are often disabled by strokes or in some other way rendered inactive and dependent, her women, particularly mothers and elderly women, are strong and active. Her plays have autobiographical elements...