Gretchen Ludke Finney was the wife of composer Ross Lee Finney. But she was an important scholar and writer on music and literature in her own right. This is her autobiography, in which her story and that of her husband are inevitably intertwined.

"It is inevitable that my life should merge with Dad's [as she nearly always referred to Ross], that events in my life should be also those in his. We see them, however, from divergent points of view. That his activities may have distracted me from my own scholarly studies, I cannot regret. Without the life that he gave me there may well have been no scholarly focus. Had I not been at Smith, with the stimulus of working with Marjorie Nicolson, had I not been always where there were fine libraries, I could have made no progress. None of it would have been possible, either, without Dad's encouragement and his assistance. ... There are times, when I write about myself, that I feel as if I were writing about another person. I can identify with the child that I was, or with the high-school student, but who is this young lady who went to Carleton, first as student, then as teacher? Not I, surely. I am not certain, even, that I would like her. Meeting Dad, being married, and our home life in Northampton or Ann Arbor span a period that is clear enough. Being at Chappy [Chappaquiddick Island] is as real as if I had been there yesterday. But who is this person who lived in Paris, Oxford, and Rome, who traveled with her distinguished husband through Greece, to Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Poznan, Berlin, Stockholm, and Brussels, who flew from Paris to New York to follow Ormandy on tour with the Philadelphia Orchestra when they gave performances of Finney's Third Symphony? ... I scarcely need to say that fact and memory often do not tally. Dad and I may have similar memories, both of them vivid, which he attaches to one event, I to another. Only when a diary provides hints, do fact and memory coincide, and even then there is room for invention."