ABSTRACT
Reading has always been for me about the certainty of loss and the possibility of recovery. What is most crucially lost and recovered is, of course, love, and home is the central symbol of that painful loss and hoped-for recovery. It is this theme which I have repeatedly sought and found (and analyzed) in literature: in my avid readings of The Bobbsey Twins series when I was 5 and 6;2 in a 1956 high school exam essay written on the Eliot quote above and drawing on the male modernists who were my first literary loves (Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Faulkner); in a senior honors thesis written at Smith College in 1961 on "Iris Murdoch's House: Art and Reality"; in a Yale lTniversity Ph.D. thesis finished in 1969 on Shakespeare's Use of the Elements of Pastoral Romance; and in my 1985 book, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays, which evolved from earlier articles on Othello and The Winter's Tale and was completed as my marriage of nineteen years was coming apart.
