Daughter of a Lutheran pastor, Timrava spent her whole life in villages of Novohrad, her region of birth. Her father encouraged his children‘s literary activities so that although Božena never left the region for very long nor had much education apart from at the local junior school and one year at the town school, she was still able to become Slovakia’s leading female novelist during her lifetime. She took the settings and themes of her stories from the two or three villages she knew best; despite this, her prose chronicles the wider features of the times in which she lived: the shift in national consciousness, profound social changes, conflicting opinions between young and old and the emancipation of women. Drawing her characters from her own environment, she depicts with candour and deep psychological insight their yearning for happiness together with such ills as alcoholism, ignorance, powerlessness, apathy and a stubborn refusal to change.
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