ABSTRACT
I didn’t go to Stratford-upon-Avon to study Shakespeare. That’s not true either. I did want to study Shakespeare. I was an English major, after all. But mainly I wanted to get away from my parents and impress my boyfriend. David had given me a brown leather-bound diary with gilt-tipped pages for a going-away present. As soon as the boat pulled out of the harbour, I started recording my feelings and impressions. After some twenty pages of imitation travel writing, the diary abruptly stops with an arrow pointing towards Oxford. Not another line. And yet what happened at Oxford was the beginning of everything, which of course I couldn’t possibly have known then. It was 1959 and I was eighteen – a literary girl in love with books (her boyfriend was an English major too).
