Patrick White wrote about Theodora Goodman in The Aunt's Story. Theodora begins her life in Australia. After the death of her mother, she moves to Europe where she witnesses atrocities during the Second World War. She becomes a progressively fragmented character throughout the course of the novel, finally being incarcerated in a mental insitution in the United States of America.

All the epigraphs in the novel, believe, are taken from the Penguin edition of White's The Aunt's Story, Harmondsworth, 1987.