Professor Vertigo

Heather Bell is a forty-something tenured professor of English at a university in a midwestern town. She is insecure, self-mocking, poorly served by therapy, doomed in love, and very funny. Though she trained as a medieval scholar, she sees life through the lens of classic films, Hitchcock's above all. She is a committed feminist, yet she has little patience for the repressive streak among some of her politically correct colleagues. In their new world, professors anxiously sanitize reading lists, check their lecture notes for possible triggers, keep their office doors open, and avoid socializing with students, and Heather resists all of it.

When she falls hard for a younger colleague, her criticism of political correctness grows sharper. Tensions over teaching, the university pecking order and eroticism come to a head when the college hires Sylvia Thourelle, an enigmatic and controversial figure whose provocative sexuality and teaching methods split the campus. Heather first takes her for an amoral temptress and an academic rival, but gradually comes to admire how fearlessly she defies convention. The learning that follows is unsettling, and the classroom is never a safe place. There may even be a murderer loose in the English department.

Professor Vertigo belongs to the comic tradition of the campus novel. Dyan Elliott pokes knowing, insider fun at a current mix of intellectual fashions and foibles, with Heather as the guide: a medievalist, would-be Hitchcock blonde, possible cougar, and very good company.