Her work at the TAA was low-level and routine: recording minutes of meetings, typing, filing, all of it less than stimulating. She seems to have approached it with some disdain, and her efforts were rewarded with similar lack of approval and little advancement. For intellectual enrichment she turned to her new colleagues, her own extensive reading, and the cultural energy to be found everywhere in mid-century Manhattan. She later recalled her first summer in New York, going with friends from the office to see Geraldine Page’s legendary performance in Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke at the Circle in the Square Theatre in the Village; she was, she felt, “in New York at last … No air-conditioning then. The heat was inhuman, and suited the atmosphere of authenticity.” She went on buying books. As ever, she was consumed with poetry: always Auden, collections by Pound, Joyce, MacNeice, Robert Graves, Roy Campbell. And prose. Graham Greene was a perennial, but also Denton Welch’s coming-of-age novella In Youth Is Pleasure and, rapturously, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (“I am almost incoherent with admiration for her”). In the spring she took a short holiday alone to a resort in Bermuda. She lay in the sun and read Sade’s Justine and Balzac’s Cousin Pons, resisted advances from men, and made friends with two women from her hotel, a Mrs. Friedland and her mother, Mrs. Katzmann, both “so outspoken and intelligent and pleasant and we discussed civil liberties.”