Staff Picks: My love affair with England

by Susan Allen Toth,   

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.