Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [0]
Cover
About the Author
Also by Alison Lurie
Foreign Affairs
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
‘Vinnie Miner, 54-year-old Anglophile professor, is in London on a six-month foundation grant. So is her young colleague, Fred Turner. Vinnie is plain and resignedly self-reliant; Fred is arrestingly handsome and moping after a breakup with his wife. Vinnie and Fred have love affairs in London. Fred’s is a fraught liaison with an actress, while Vinnie drifts into a relationship with an engineer from Oklahoma she met on the plane, a brash uneducated stereotype American who finally beguiles her (and the reader) with his uncomplicated goodness . . . I devoured the book at a sitting and then went back for a second dip at once’
Penelope Lively, Sunday Telegraph
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alison Lurie is Professor of American Literature at Cornell University. Foreign Affairs won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 and The Truth About Lorin Jones won the Prix Femina Etranger in 1989.
ALSO BY ALISON LURIE
The Nowhere City
Imaginary Friends
Real People
Only Children
The Truth About Lorin Jones
Love and Friendship
The War Between the Tates
The last Resort
Women and Ghosts
V.R. Lang: Poems and Plays. With a memoir by Alison Lurie
The Language of Clothes
Don’t Tell the Grownups: Subversive Children’s Literature
Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales
Fabulous Beasts
The Heavenly Zoo
This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Epub ISBN: 9781446425534
Version 1.10
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Vintage 1998
14
Copyright © Alison Lurie 1984
The right of Alison Lurie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
First published in Great Britain by
Michael Joseph 1985
Vintage
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
www.randomhouse.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780749397937
For Diane Johnson
1
* * *
As I walked by myself
And talked to myself,
Myself said unto me,
Look to thyself,
Take care of thyself,
For nobody cares for thee.
Old song
ON a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten A.M. flight to London, followed by an invisible dog. The woman’s name is Virginia Miner: she is fifty-four years old, small, plain, and unmarried—the sort of person that no one ever notices, though she is an Ivy League college professor who has published several books and has a well-established reputation in the expanding field of children’s literature.
The dog that is trailing Vinnie, visible only to her imagination, is her familiar demon or demon familiar, known to her privately as Fido and representing self-pity. She visualizes him as a medium-sized dirty-white long-haired mutt, mainly Welsh terrier: sometimes trailing her silently, at other times whining and panting and nipping at her heels; when bolder, dashing round in circles trying to trip her up, or at least get her to stoop down so that he may rush at her, knock her to the ground, and cover her with sloppy kisses. Vinnie knows very well that Fido wants to get onto the plane with her, but she hopes to leave him behind, as she has successfully done on other trips abroad. Recent events, however, and the projected length of her stay, make this unlikely.
Vinnie is leaving today for six months in England on a foundation grant. There, under her professional name of V. A. Miner, she will continue her study of the folk-rhymes of schoolchildren.