Anna has landed the job of a life-time: a tenure-track position as assistant professor. Transplanted from a big urban university to a small-town college, from Manhattan to a tomato farm in Virginia, she is far more excited about her new life than her friends and family, who look on skeptically as she struggles with combative colleagues, difficult students, a deranged hoarder who keeps breaking into her office, and her growing infatuation with Professor Giles Cleveland, an arrogant, overbearing Englishman who seems to think that hiring her was a disastrous mistake. When a female graduate accuses the department chair of sexual violence, and graffiti arson threats appear in the college hallways, Anna is glad of the chance to get away for a few days to attend a conference. It worries her that Cleveland, for reasons possibly unknown even to himself, has decided to come along. After all, they agree that for a newbie to start an affair with a senior colleague would be professional suicide – especially if this affair is conducted in dark corners on campus and with ever increasing recklessness. The Englishman is a sexy and romantic campus novel that asks the question many a working girl has to ask herself: Is it ever a good idea to dib your nib into the office ink?
Renaissance anatomy
This is one of the anatomy illustrations that Anna talks about in her conference paper at Notre Dame University: 'De Formato Foetu' in Casserio and Spiegel's De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1631)
The Observatory
The old Observatory in Stockholm is a little like I imagine the observatory at Ardrossan - only at night! (Photo by Helen Pohl; no copyright infringement intended!)
Shakespeare's sonnet no. 1
FROM fairest creatures we desire increase
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
(from: The Oxford Shakespeare, ed. W. J. Craig, 1914)
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
(from: The Oxford Shakespeare, ed. W. J. Craig, 1914)