A naturally reticent gentleman of the old school, Stephen McKenna revealed little about himself even in his first autobiography, While I Remember (1921), which focuses mainly on his surroundings. Yet in his fifty-year career, which at its peak saw the issue of two novels a year, McKenna published forty-seven novels, six nonfiction works, and numerous stories and articles; this output seems more remarkable when one notes that, of these, only one novel was published between 1939 and 1948. He also wrote four plays that remain unpublished. McKenna's Irish background and his portrayals of upper-class English society lead to comparisons with Oscar Wilde, but Wilde, unlike McKenna, was Irish born and bred, was an outsider to that society, and portrayed it with romantic imagination and humor.

Born in Beckenham, Kent, on 27 February 1888 to Leopold and Ellen (Gethen) McKenna, Stephen McKenna descended from a Protestant family whose royal Catholic forefathers had inhabited County...