VEZA CANETTI LEFT NO DIARY and her surviving letters rarely mention her own writing. There are no contemporary reviews of the fifteen stories she published in newspapers during her lifetime because they never appeared in book form. Her husband's friend, the Czech-born poet and chronicler of Theresienstadt, H. G. Adler, is the only contemporary to comment on anything she wrote. He did so in a private letter about one of her three plays sixteen years after it was written, seemingly unaware that she was also the author of novels and stories, for which she is now more famous. We know little about what Veza read prior to arriving in London because she left nearly all her books in Vienna when she and Canetti fled in the wake of the Kristallnacht in November 1938. According to Canetti, she destroyed all the unpublished work she could lay her hands on in 1956 in despair at not finding publishers in either Britain or Germany. Shortly before his own death but after the outside world had finally shown interest in his first wife, he burnt the letters they had written to each other. He did not, however, dispose of his own notebooks, in which he expresses his affection and, in the year of her death, his overwhelming grief at her passing. He also kept draft chapters for the second two installments of his autobiography, The Torch in the Ear and The Play of the Eyes, where he explores her character and their relationship far more candidly than in the denuded versions he presented for publication.