Fanny Foote came to New York to seek

her fortune, had sailed off high-hearted,

and has been depressed ever since. She is

not seriously depressed but unpleasantly

grounded, in part by her dull job at a

feminist magazine but also by the failure

of freedom to bring extravagant returns.

She is twenty-six and treading water, and

now without warning Fate plucks her

from tedious obscurity and assigns her

Success, Travel, Romance.

Fanny is a woman of her generation,

sexually active, and privately disap-

pointed. Her father and mother--re-

sponsible, caring parents are people of

their generation; Elizabeth worried

every time the phone rings to hear from

her sad daughter, Marcus waiting for that

daughter to get on with it.

At the heart of this otherwise excellent

Foote family is a fi ftccn-year rift. After a

quarrel, Fanny s adored aunt Caroline

decamped abruptly with the elegant

Lutecie Tavcrnier for France, where they

established a sort of fancy boarding-

house for scholars, writers, and musi-

cians, and have made a narnc for

themselves. When Fanny s editor dis-

covers her relationship to Footc and

Tavernier she is ccstatic because, she

says, they arc the quintessential lesbians,

and she sends Fanny off to write them up.

Fanny, shocked to death, goes.

Seton calls herself a writer of serious

comedy, a soft feminist, and (reluctantly)

a moralist. She lives in Northampton,

Massachusetts. This is her fifth novel.