My Love Affair with England

She has turned the ordinary seasons of her life into extraordinary and evocative memoirs in Blooming, Ivy Days, and How to Prepare for Your High-School Reunion. She has touched readers with recollections of her youth and girlhood, her coming-of-age, and her recognition of days gone by. Now, in My Love Affair with England, Susan Allen Toth shares another aspect of her extraordinary inner life: the quietly passionate side of a woman who has been in love with England for the past thirty years. A traveler's memoir as personal as it is inviting, this modern odyssey explores what happens when the vital imagination of a writer from the American Midwest meets the many-layered legacy that is Great Britain. As a twenty-year-old student, Ms. Toth first went to London for a single summer, but she has returned again and again to the land of Shakespeare, sheepdog trials, royalty, and trifle. Exploring the countryside, traveling both second-class and in luxury, theatre-hopping, ghost-hunting, spending her doomed first honeymoon, or shepherding students through a touring seminar, Ms. Toth brings her special England vividly to life in essays that are by turns humorous, bittersweet, and wonderfully eccentric.