She talked all through lunch one day with the novelist Dawn Powell, then finally paused and said to Powell, “But you were going to say something.” Powell replied: “I was going to say, ‘Hello, Esther.’”

She could not live without books, but it seemed that she also needed a live audience. If you asked her a question—“it could be a question about a seventeenth-century Florentine economist, a question about almost anything”—she would lean back, take several staccato puffs on her cigarette, say: “All we know is”—and then launch into a long disquisition on the subject. All we know. The phrase announces the partial, human quality of that knowledge—collective and individual—and the encyclopedic discourse that would follow. It is at once “everything we know” and “the very little we know,” a declaration of comprehensiveness and incompletion.

It is hard to think of an American writer of the first half of the century, iconic or less known, whose life was not bound up with alcohol.

She had set pieces that could be requested—or averted, since “when she got onto one of these stories, it would take two or three hours to tell,” as Sybille Bedford observed. One of these stories was about the Hanseatic League, a complex patch of Northern European history that Esther would declare she was one of the few to understand—and would now explain. “I used to say you had to steer her, like the Queen Mary,” recalled James Douglas, a friend of her later years, referring to the inexorability of these long discourses.

The Depression, the deaths of her parents, and the mismanagement of the Mark Cross Company, which Patrick Murphy had left in the control of a mistress, meant that Esther’s income amounted more to the habit of having money and an inability to economize than actual wealth.