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his readers in the epigram to Howards End to “only connect,” but my life at that time was beset by extreme disconnection of its parts. In truth, I had come back to New York for mainly personal reasons and as my mother but not my employers knew, my private life was in shambles. Before leaving Barnard, I had become involved with a woman lover, a philosophy professor nineteen years older than I. For years I had known of my sexual feelings for women but done my best to repress them. Finally, this became impossible. My craving for the experience grew stronger than my fear of it, and I got swept up into an affair. Nothing seemed more urgent to me in those months before leaving New York than to slip out of our apartment on one pretext or another and take the bus down Broadway from where we lived on 113th Street to my lover’s place on 97th. I had assumed the affair would end when we left for Virginia, but it didn’t. Donald found out about it right at the time of our departure and was enraged. Our children, Emily and Sean, knew because Donald told them. I saw their unhappiness, yet, at once obsessed and guilty, I persisted in my double life, trying to hold onto my family and traveling to New York whenever possible.

In the fall of 1985 our family was still in crisis and in pieces. Donald had moved out from “Tara,” and when I left to begin at Brooklyn College, he stayed behind in the house he had bought in Virginia, and thirteen-year-old Sean, for the time being, stayed with him. Donald and I would get back together a year later in Brooklyn before separating for good, more deliberately and amicably, in the spring of 1988. Meanwhile, alone for the first time in sixteen years (the lover and I were winding down), I rented a small apartment in Park Slope, Emily, then fifteen, started as a tenth-grade boarder at Choate-Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, and Sean, clinging to the familiarity of Virginia, was truculent when I visited him there or brought him to New York. In his eyes I’d messed up badly. And I didn’t disagree. I felt I’d taken a sledge hammer to my precious family life. My neck was stiff for a year.

How this debacle more or less righted itself to lead to my long, fulfilling career as a professor—no longer a dean—at Brooklyn College as well as to a less fraught personal life for me and greater stability for all of us is a story I will get to. I want, though, to linger in that fall of 1985 when my desires were at such cross-purposes: to be a professional success; to care for a family; to feel accepted by men and stay connected with them, yet at the same time be free to explore deeper relations with women.

Different books engage us at different junctures of our lives. For me, in the mid-1980s, a woman struggling to work out the terms of her adult life and finding conventional paradigms an inadequate fit, it makes sense I should be drawn to the texts of an earlier transitional era—the late nineteenth, early twentieth century—in which heterosexual marriage is questioned and women throw off, or at least loosen, traditional shackles. I was shifting in my fictional allegiance from the Victorian orphan to the turn-of-the-century new woman, and the force of my family background, education, aspirations, era, and sexuality led me on. But while I found quite thrilling every novel’s heroine who manages to liberate herself from a tyrannical or inadequate husband or lover, I personally wanted not so much to be freed from marriage as to have it expand its terms. Back in 1974 I had read Nigel Nicholson’s Portrait of a Marriage, the moving story of his parents’ acceptance of each other’s homosexuality within the framework of their marriage, and then dared to imagine such accommodations were possible, that loving women did not have to rule out an enduring bond with a man. It took a long time for me to act, but when I did, I still had that ideal in mind. Of course, Vita Sackville West and Harold Nicholson were both homosexual, they had Sissinghurst to hold them together, and they belonged to a milieu that tolerated their complex choices. In my own situation I could draw on no such supports, nor reasonably ask such tolerance of my husband. Many years later, when we again were friends, he told me he was sorry to have been so angry and wished he’d acted differently. I’m not sure what either of us could have done differently back then, but the collapse of our fifteen-year marriage, for all its ups and downs, was very painful for us both.

THE Brooklyn College Womens’ Studies talk on The Odd Women and Howards End began with a much clearer delineation of alternatives than I ever faced in my own life. I began by reviewing those final epilogue chapters that provide such comfort in Victorian fiction in which we hear how Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester have settled down, supremely blessed, and he has regained sufficient sight to see the color of his first-born’s eyes. Or how Esther Summerson in Bleak House is blissfully happy in her marriage to Allan Woodcourt, he serving as father both to his and Esther’s children and to Ada Clare’s fatherless one. Or how Dorothea and Celia in Middlemarch, reconnected despite their dissimilar marriages, visit back and forth with their husbands tolerating one another and their children forming the close bonds of a new generation. But how might a novel end, I asked, in which marriage no longer serves as any persuasive sort of paradigm for mutual fulfillment and the resolution of problems? What ongoing life, what future possibilities might it point to?

The Odd Women and Howards End preserve a variation of the epilogue Victorian chapter. Strife has been resolved; a peaceful mood prevails; the