Summary:

Daughter of a wealthy businessman, tall, beautiful Emily Stockwell Turner falls out of love with her stolid professor husband, Holman, halfway through their first semester at a small college for men in northern New England. She is lonely and miserable in this remote place. Encouraged by her confidante and fellow faculty wife, Miranda, she embarks on a secret affair with the college musician, Will Thomas.

Divorced and sexually experienced, Will initiates Emmy into the powerful romance of physical love. But their on-again, off-again relationship is fraught by its own secrecy, Holman's jealous suspicions, Will's infidelities, Emmy's lies, Miranda's disingenuous disinterest, and the not-so-irrational hatred that Freddy, Emmy's four-year old son, bears Will.

Emmy and Will take ever greater risks with their clandestine encounters; eventually they admit to being truly in love and she decides to join him in his move to New York City. But Holman falls ill and nearly loses his contract position at the University when he tries to kill a student demonstrator whom he wrongly suspects of being Emmy's lover. Emmy postpones her departure indefinitely, because Holman "needs" her more.

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Summary:

At the height of campus unrest over Vietnam, Brian Tate, the conventional, politically moderate, foreign policy professor at Corinth (clearly Ithaca), has an office affair with his blonde graduate student, Wendy, but only after the vapid flower-child has pursued him relentlessly for months. Brian’s wife, Erica, learns of his infidelity when she reads Wendy’s ungrammatical but explicit letter.

Miserable at home with their two shockingly difficult adolescent children, Erica is unemployed because Brian disapproves of her working. She confronts him; Wendy apologizes to her; Brian lies; Wendy is forced to have an abortion; Brian moves out; Wendy moves in; Erica grows thin and ages prematurely. She takes up with an old friend who has become a wan new-age ’guru,’ but he is often impotent.

Wendy becomes pregnant again, terrifying Brian into believing he must marry her. But she spares him this punishment by moving to a California commune with Ralph, who, unlike Brian, does not care about biological origin of her child. Hoping to return, Brian visits Erica; she is expecting him with wary resignation.

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Summary:

Unmarried, fifty-four year-old Virginia Miner (Vinnie), a professor at Corinth who specializes in children's literature, is off to London for another research trip. Her work has been trashed by a Professor L. Zimmern of Columbia and she is hoping to produce an important new book about playground rhymes that will restore her reputation and confidence.

A 'pro' at long flights, her serenity is ruffled by her seatmate, a garrulous married man, Chuck Mumpson, of Tulsa who wishes to chat. She puts him off with difficulty. But the smoking and drinking Chuck is persistent. He could use help with a research trip of his own to trace his family history. Vinnie slowly becomes involved with his project, and then with him.

Meanwhile, her young colleague, Fred Turner, has left his wife, Roo, at home for his own sabbatical; they have quarreled. Soon, he consoles himself with the affections of Lady Rosemary Hadley. Quite by accident and with the encouragement of Chuck, Vinnie becomes an emissary for Fred's estranged wife in an improbable midnight walk on Hampstead Heath.

Just as she begins to think Chuck's affections have cooled, because of his silence of several days duration, she is visited by his daughter who describes his sudden death while climbing the stairs of a small town hall. When her publisher patronizes his memory, she realizes with surprise that he loved her and she loved him. She returns to her life in Corinth, solitary and unloved, but altered for having loved and been loved.

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