An English professor makes the journey of a lifetime--searching to travel through the eyes of British and Irish writers, to see the landscapes that inspired them, to follow in the footsteps of their heroes and heroines, to combine two great loves--travel and literature. Her travels in 1980 took her to Ireland where she followed Leopold Bloom's wanderings around Dublin in Joyce's Ulysses; then to Scotland where she entered the world of Stevenson's Kidnapped and followed David Balfour's path back to Edinburgh from Mull; and to Dorset where she sought to discover the route and live in the same type of lodgings similar to those of Tess of the Durbervilles in Hardy's eponymous novel. Along the way she visited other beloved writers in their settings--the Brontes in Yorkshire, Wordsworth in the Lake District, Byron in Nottinghamshire, George Eliot in Coventry, Shakespeare in Stratford, Jane Austen in Bath (Northanger Abbey) to discover the inspirational settings of their works. Along the way she is drawn into the life around her and finds herself with one foot in the past and the other in the present. She recaptures and records her adventures and reactions in this memoir.