It encapsulates like nothing else I have ever read the joys and frustrations of literary scholarship.

I read it a bit later in my life -- I was struggling in grad school -- and it really spoke to me about scholarship too, and what I actually wanted, and how smothered to death I felt by the literary theory in the 1990s. (I wound up dropping out.) It felt like a friendly support in a time when I badly needed one. And her writing is of course so beautiful.