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 theater, returning to the novel but once. In all, she wrote eight plays, one of which, The Chalk Garden (1955), verbally dazzling, has the mark of permanency about it.

Born in Rochester, Kent, England, Enid Bagnold was the daughter of A. H. and Ethel Alger Bagnold. She spent part of her childhood in Jamaica where her father was in command of the Royal Engineers. When she was twelve, she returned to England to an exclusive girls' school, Prior's Field, run by Aldous Huxley's mother. At seventeen she attended finishing schools in Germany and Switzerland before coming back to England and making her debut at age eighteen. As a young...