The Theoretical Foot

When her long-time agent and friend Robert Lescher died in 2012, the manuscript of M.F.K. Fisher's unpublished first novel was discovered packed tidily away in one of Lescher's signature red boxes.<br><br>Following on the success of <i>Serve It Forth</i> and written when she was in her early 30s, the novel employs Fisher's characteristic sharp-eyed wit to sketch themes so outré they may have seemed too challenging for a proper woman of her time to attempt.<br><br>Set in the late 1930s,<i>The Theoretical Foot</i> concerns two expat American couples in Europe, tramping from country to country without sanction of marriage, this during an era when cohabitation - to say nothing of a girl's hitchhiking! - could ruin a respectable woman's reputation for all time. As fascism spreads and war inevitably approaches, the idyll of a beautiful life of love and freedom from convention is also threatened from within, as the man in one of the couples falls gravely ill with a rare circulatory disease.<br>