Kitty in Providence is the sort of heroine an author invents in order to subject her to a life of disappointments. These are mitigated for her by academic interests—hers in the Romantic tradition, her lover's in French cathedrals. The novel is warm and delightful about donnish life, exhibiting its own kind of donnishness in a sentence like 'The dog was very old, and did not seem particularly viable.' But Kitty's plight is to be half-French, and her common sense, her clothes sense and her solid affections are all on her French side. She lives in Chelsea, but her England is a fantasy constructed around a dead soldier-father and a lover she cannot picture…. Worse: the lover is indeed as near as one can get to a fantasy Englishman, a professor with a pleasant vague smile, 'wandering around with a cup in one hand and a saucer...