Then the writer is awarded 'The Prize', at just the moment when the old servant lies dying in squalor behind her locked front door. The woman is ferociously eccentric, at times arguably quite mad, but over the decades a strange bond of love grows up between them, creating a terrible mutual dependence. To cope with the sudden flurry of attention this brings, she hires a dour peasant woman to help out in her nice new flat, in a leafy suburb of Budapest. In it, a novelist remarkably like Magda Szabó herself is unexpectedly returned to political favour.

Her Tündér Lala ('Lala the fairy',1964) is considered among the finest examples of juvenile fiction in the language. Throughout her life Szabó continued to address audiences of all ages indeed her most widely read book is Abigel ('Abigail', 1970), an adventure story about a schoolgirl boarding in eastern Hungary during the war, popularised through a much-loved television series. In the same year as Fresco, a more innocent readership was delighted by the appearance of Bárány Boldiszar ('Lawrence the lamb'), moral tales in verse, while Mondják meg Zsófikának ('Tell young Sophie') spoke directly to younger teenage girls. Again the protagonist is a woman and an artist, presented with a blend of warm empathy and unwavering intelligence.īut Szabó has a lighter side too. Az õz ('The fawn', 1959) equally connects personal issues (the heart-searchings of a young actress involved with a married man) to public ones, the sufferings and privations of rural people through the inter-war years and into the Stalinist Fifties. Four generations of a puritan family gather for a funeral, where, through a series of intense inner monologues, a suffocating web of lies, prejudices and hypocrisies is explored, at the same time evoking almost the entire history of Hungary since 1860.

Her first novel, Freskó ('Fresco', 1958), set the tone for much of what was to follow.

Az ajtó by Magda Szabó