This unusual autobiography is an intimate first-person chronicle of emotional growth and spiritual search from the diaries of a young woman living and studying in Oxford in the late 1970's. It is interlaced with a contemporary commentary from herself fifty years later at the age of 72 when she rediscovered the long-forgotten diaries. As an older woman, in the pages of the diaries she was again immersed in the atmosphere of the ancient university town, and the delights and despairs of her own youthful quest to find and articulate a meaningful framework for life and loving during six seminal years.

The wisdom of hindsight makes these diaries much more than just a trip down memory lane. Throughout the narrative, intertwining voices of Youth and Age create a profound and sometimes searing portrayal of love, loss and the quest for wisdom, catalysed by a combination of academic learning and direct perception.

Oxford itself, the "town of dreaming spires" is an evocative backdrop, and almost a protagonist in its own right in this fresh and poetic evocation before the sprawl of modern developments and the influence of mass tourism.