This memoir recounts the personal evolution of a highly accomplished professor of literature forced to confront a debilitating health crisis involving her back. As a result she questions the path she has taken in life, examining with relentless candor her own past. At the same time, her obsession with a nineteenth century literary figure, Constance Fenimore Woolson, leads her on an unpredictable and surprising course of speculation on matters of spirituality, feminism, and personal psychology. The author's intelligence, humor, determination, and sheer literary skill take this memoir well beyond the usual inspirational new age stuff, and the result is a fine meditation on the coming together of many forces that refocus and redefine her sense of self.