England, for Vinnie, is and has always been the imagined and desired country. For a quarter of a century she visited it in her mind, where it had been slowly and lovingly shaped and furnished out of her favorite books, from Beatrix Potter to Anthony Powell. When at last she saw it she felt like the children in John Masefield’s The Box of Delightswho discover that they can climb into the picture on their sitting-room wall. The landscape of her interior vision had become life-size and three-dimensional; she could literally walk into the country of her mind. From the first hour England seemed dear and familiar to her; London, especially, was almost an experience of déjà vu. She also felt that she was a nicer person there and that her life was more interesting. These sensations increased rather than diminished with time, and have been repeated as often as Vinnie could afford. Over the past decade she has visited England nearly every year-though usually, alas, for only a few weeks. Tonight she will begin her longest stay yet: an entire six months. Her fantasy is that one day she will be able to live in London permanently, even perhaps become an Englishwoman. A host of difficulties-legal, financial, practical-are involved in this fantasy, and Vinnie has no idea how she could ever solve them all; but she wants it so much that perhaps one day it can be managed.

Many teachers of English, like Vinnie, fall in love with England as well as with her literature. With familiarity, however, their infatuation often declines into indifference or even contempt. If they long for her now, it is as she was in the past-most often, in the period of their own specialization: for the colorful, vital England of Shakespeare’s time, or the lavish elegance and charm of the Edwardian period. With the bitterness of disillusioned lovers, they complain that contemporary Britain is cold, wet, and overpriced; its natives unfriendly; its landscape and even its climate ruined. England is past her prime, they say; she is worn-out and old; and, like most of the old, boring.