The main plot of Th e App le of Love is based on a true story: During the Great Depression Harry and Emily had a fi ve year love affair as young adults that reignites sixty years later when Harrys wife is in a nursing home. The drama unfolds through the eyes of an old man, his convalescent wife and their daughter, Marie. Marie uses her perception of what her parents experienced, her understanding of what they told her and her wild imagination to tell the story.

Focusing on women's writing of the last two centuries, Scenes of the Apple traces the intricate relationship between food and body image for women. Ranging over a variety of genres, including novels, culinary memoirs, and essays, the contributors explore works by a diverse group of writers, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Toni Morrison, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Jeanette Winterson, as well as such nonliterary documents as discussions of Queen Victoria's appetite and news coverage of suffragettes' hunger strikes. Moreover, in addressing works by Hispanic, African, African American, Jewish, and lesbian writers, the book explodes the myth that only white, privileged, and heterosexual women are concerned with body image, and shows the many cultural contexts in which food and cooking are important in women's literature. Above all, the essays pay tribute to the rich and multiple meanings of food in women's writing as a symbol for all kinds of delightful—and transgressive—desires.