Emerence agrees to come work for her on her own terms, but she will not, she informs Magda, just be a person to "wash the dirty linen" of whoever is willing to hire her.

The neighbours on their street are bewildered by but still respect this odd elderly woman who is so particular in her habits and guards the closed doors of her house with the utmost secrecy.

Shortly after this episode, Magda and her husband find a starving puppy and take it in, with the intention of nourishing it back to health and then giving it away.

Emerence develops so much trust for Magda that she allows her inside her house, an honour she has bestowed on nobody else in decades, not even her three best friends or her own nephew.

As the back of the New York Review of Books publication of the novel writes, "Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship to Hungary's Communist authorities".

[3] The author, Magda Szabó, was also an educated writer and married to an academic, the Hungarian translator Tibor Szobotka.

Even the on-again-off-again relationship that Magda in the book enjoys with the Hungarian government is evocative of Szabo's relationship with that same institution; while she did win many national literary awards, she was also labelled an "enemy of the people" by the Communist government, was fired from the Ministry of Education, and had her books banned from publication from 1949 to 1956.