If Alison Lurie had written Villette, the heroine Lucy Snowe’s life would have gone in a different direction. In Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Lucy has few options. During a summer break at the Belgian school where she teaches English, she becomes so lonely that she decides to go to Confession at a Catholic church. She is not Catholic, but she needs to speak to someone. One wonders at her choice, because she has already seen the ghost of a nun in the attic and been terrified. But she has hit rock bottom.
The priest is comforting, but when she leaves she gets dizzy and faints on the church steps. The priest and a doctor rescue her, and the doctor takes her home to be nursed by his mother, who turns out to be her godmother, Mrs. Bretton, whom she has not seen in years. The Brettons are refreshingly Protestant, but the dangers and attractions of Catholicism haunt Lucy, particularly after M. Paul takes an interest. Bronte’s Catholics are quite a Jesuitical bunch.
After reading Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs, I can imagine Lucy as a Vinnie type. (See my blog on Foreign Affairs.) If she got lonely, or exhausted from her research at the British Library, she might go out for a Cappuccino. “I abhor Americanos,” she would tell the barista. Not to be confused with Americans: the Americano is a drink. Like Vinnie in Foreign Affairs, she would run into the American middle-aged businessman she met on the plane. I mean, why not? He has escaped from the package tour of Ye Olde England, because the Tower of London wasn’t his thing. England wasn’t his thing. Mind you, I do think Lucy might alternatively go shopping at Harrods. Give her a bit of Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris. She could use a new dress, or slacks, or whatever. And shopping, at least in small doses, can be fun. But did she lose her credit card? That would not be fun!
Fortunately, it was in the Lost and Found at the British Museum.
I wish you had gone on with this rereading of Villette from an Alison Lurie POV. I’ve only read her non-fiction, not her fiction. I agree that sometimes when you travel — or even most of the time — as a middle-aged female American _to be safe_ you end up surrounded by all the people who are paid to be your temporary servers and Americans. This is the real problem with Road Scholar but since I have no one to travel with, and travel itself is an ordeal I become very nervous from, I need a company which does it all for me. So it’s the Road Scholar kind of experience or nothing. You might say luckily I don’t have money to do more than one such tour a year, and I’ve become aware of how more and more dangerous airplane flight is (and know from experience how awful) and have kept away insofar as that is possible from crowds in order not to get sick. The one time I went (to England, to Somerville and then London) both Izzy and I came home with bad viruses.
I do long to stop teaching but if I do I will be terribly lonely and without a continual round of things to read and to do — and I keep up acquaintances this way. I shall really try to fit in one of the two books by her I have in my house.
Ideally we would all have grants to travel and live abroad for a few months! Solitary travel is difficult, though I love travel books by women, who navigate with the ease I certainly don’t have. I’m no Isabella Bird! I do think you would enjoy Lurie’s novels: many of them are academic comedies. Not satires! I can’t imagine you not teaching, but you do deserve NOT to teach if you decide not to. I love Lurie and love Charlotte Bronte, but poor Lucy has SUCH a bad time, struggling against the snoopy headmistress, etc. The 20th century would have been easier for her.