Arcadia Falcone was born in California, but has been fascinated with British culture from an early age. She made her first visit to London in 1995, and returned to England the following year in a tour that also encompassed France and Italy. After graduating from high school, she participated in a month-long summer programme in Oxford, during which she foolishly followed the rules and refrained from travelling outside the city on her own. (She did, however, pose as a university student to sneak into University College and pay homage at the Shelley shrine by reading the tract on atheism that got him expelled from the college).
Arcadia attended Swarthmore College, which experience she loved so much that she couldn't bear to tear herself away to study abroad for a semester. To remedy this lack, and to occupy her gap year before commencing graduate studies in English literature with something interesting, she decided to obtain a visa through the BUNAC programme and spend six months working in London. After a month on the job quest she at long last obtained gainful employment from the law firm of Benson Mazure, as a receptionist and general girl Friday. She spent five months languishing at the bottom of the office hierarchy and exhausting the contents of the Archway public library, before escaping to range at will around the country and test the limits of British public transportation. Upon returning to the States she once more joined the ranks of the employed, but in the more congenial atmosphere of a bookshop. At present she is again enjoying the intellectual pleasures of academia as a first-year English Ph.D candidate at University of California, Berkeley.
Epistolary missives may be
directed
to arcadia(at)sccs(dot)swarthmore(dot)edu.