The author, journalist, and grand dame of Austrian literature (as she was known in her own lifetime), Hilde Spiel, was born in Vienna in 1911. She emigrated to London in 1936, returning to her Austria for the first time in 1946 as correspondent for the New Statesman. Beginning during her long years of emigration, she created a series of impressive works in both English and German novels such as Flute and Drums and The Darkened Room, her biography of Fanny von Arnstein, several volumes of stories, literary essays and critical works, as well as translations of works by renowned English poets, novelists and dramatists. For twenty years she was Austrian correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Weltwoche, and from 1937 onward an active member of International PEN. She later became general secretary and then vice-president of Austrian PEN. In the early 1960s she resettled in Austria for good, despite her awareness that the chasm between those who had stayed at home and those who had emigrated would never again close completely. In her later years she was honoured with several important literary prizes. Her memoirs, a microcosm of literary and political life in Europe during the upheavals of the twentieth century, not only vividly portray Hilde Spiel as an individual and an intellectual of her time, but also convey the conflicting forces in the lives of Europeans during and after the years of the Second World War.