In Foreign Cities — Anna Mitgutsch

In Foreign Cities deals with an American woman who, after fifteen years of marriage to an Austrian businessman, begins an affair with a young American singer, leaves her husband and two children, and returns to her homeland in search of her lost identity as a poet and the personal artistic fulfillment that she feels has been denied to her in the foreign environment. Lillian's journey leads her through a series of internal and external confrontations with a past ideal that is not compatible with the present reality, on her way to a final resolution of the conflicts with herself and with family members who haunt her memories: a well-adjusted sister who is her social opposite; a grandmother who envisioned for her the literary success she has not realized; a father who rejected her; the husband and children whom she has left behind. The ending brings the tragic insight that she has been victimized by a false perception of her life and talent. Her problem is not the world around her but lies within herself.