[4] She grew up initially in Pratteln, where her parents rented a large rambling house with a child-friendly garden, and then when her father got a full-time job at the district court there, to a modern easy-to-manage family apartment in Liestal.
[4] These are small towns to the east and south of Basel along the old road towards Olten, but still within the Canton of Basel-Landschaft, and thereby culturally and linguistically Germanic.
Critics and scholars were impressed: "Open a page at random, and [wherever you land] Adelheid Duvanel's dense sentences will drive you breathlessly to read on.
Sullen, sardonic, simultaneously wistful and gloomy, [her] prose miniatures are twisted fairy tales featuring pixie depressives nurturing secret griefs".
One of her greatest fans was the professor and literature polymath Peter von Matt, who contributed lengthy elucidatory epilogues for two of her volumes.
Throughout their marriage, which lasted till 1981, they lived together in Basel, albeit with one lengthy exception, during 1969/69, when they took an extended trip to the little island of Formentera (directly to the south of Ibiza).
Their first meeting took place at her parents' house: her younger brother Felix and brought his friend Joe home with the very best of intentions, because he thought that contact between Adelheid and, another talented young artist with a temperament to match, might help draw Adelheid out of the isolation into which she had sunk, still living with her deeply conservative parents, and two younger siblings with effortlessly conformist instincts, at the age of 19.
During the early years of their marriage, when their apartment was something of a meeting point for Basel's young Bohemians, the painter Joseph Duvanel was the focus of attention, while his wife typically remained isolated in a corner.
Adelheid returned to Basel with her daughter and lived temporarily with her aging parents, while her brother Felix arranged for her prose miniatures to be published in newspapers to provide her with a necessary income.
When Joe and his new friend returned to Basel he succeeded in negotiation a shared domestic arrangement which amounted to living as a threesome.
Although Adelheid the child's mother was by this time leading her life in a submissive haze, the expulsion of her daughter from the family apartment caused her a level of upset which led to her being sent away to another clinic.
While her "prose miniatures", notwithstanding their frequently grim dénouements, retained a certain cool detachment throughout her personal difficulties, there are commentators who identify something curiously autobiographical in the unhappiness communicated by many of her art works.
[1][9][11] For the rest of her life, from approximately 1980, Adelheid Duvanel was subjected to repeated bouts of psychiatric treatment, although she became progressively more distrustful of the practitioners providing it.
[4] Towards the end she suffered a protracted episode of memory loss and disorientation, and was advised by one of the professionals whom she consulted to expect such incidents to recur and become progressively more frequent.
[1][7] On the first day of Christmas in 1956 two farm workers found the body of Robert Walser, frozen to death in the snow in the hills near Herisau.
[7] Commentators quickly identified a long list of parallels between the lives, the output, and the deaths of Walser and Duvanel, two brilliant writers who had both, during their final decades, increasingly fallen under the supervision of psychiatrists, but Walser had lived slightly longer and, it seemed, achieved a slightly more broadly based level of recognition with readers during his lifetime.
In a piece written after her death, Peter Hamm offered the possible explanation that "perhaps Adelheid Duvanel's literary accomplishments were only possible at the price of being misunderstood".