Edith Templeton was born in Prague in 1916, a subject of the Emporer Franz Josef. The child of estate-owners on both sides, she spent much of her childhood in a castle in the Bohemian countryside. As a girl, she knew both parents of President Havel, and had cousins who were part of Kafka's circle in Prague. She courted scandal from an early age with her writing. When she was fourteen, an essay she had published in a student paper created a problem for the government and caused her to be excluded from all further education by the Republic: in the midst of a coal strike, she wrote how well-heate...