She throws herself into her English travel experiences with enthusiasm and open-mindedness and seems especially adept at locating the quaint and bizarre just off the beaten path. She loves the great country houses, sprawling gardens, inviting tearooms, mysterious family ghost legends, wooded or breezy cliffside walks, and fun local customs like badger watching or sheepdog competitions. Susan Allen Toth clearly loves England - everything about it. But while those parts are sprinkled in for a bit of realism here and there, they are by no means the main focus of the book. She doesn't shy away from discussing the less savory parts of her trips - her daughter's Dickensian foreign exchange experience, for instance, or the freezing hotel that almost gave one of her students a recurrence of kidney disease. Susan Allen Toth walks the line perfectly. That's not why I travel, and that's not why I read travel writing. On the other hand, I've read travel memoirs that gleefully zero in on the "seedy" parts of the subject country - and "seedy" parts do exist in every country, even a country as cozy as England - and take too much delight in describing teeming underworlds of malcontents, oily gas stations and fluorescent lights. Not only can that be hard to swallow, but it's also rather patronizing. On the one hand, they can be overly saccharine and romantic, imbuing the places and the locals with too much quaintness. I've become familiar with the stories that Susan Allen Toth tells about her favorite country, so that they almost feel like bedtime stories. I first read this cheery travel memoir when I was in high school and had no chance whatsoever of going to England because my parents didn't have any desire to go.
I picked up My Love Affair with England again recently, for what must be the umpteenth time, in preparation for my upcoming vacation.
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