"All really great lovers are articulate.  Verbal seduction is the surest road to actual seduction." 

So wrote the social critic and writer Marya Mannes (1904 - 1990), editor at Vogue from 1933 - 1936 and prolific contributor to The Reporter and The New Yorker.   I think Ms Mannes would have appreciated An Education, the recent film based on a part of the memoir of another writer and critic, Lynn Barber. 

On one level An Education tells a familiar story: a smooth-talking cad seduces a clever but naive young school girl. The title, however, refers not just to the education the young lady receives under the tutelage of the older gentleman, but the formal education she risks losing -- her bright future at Oxford -- if she opts for the life her lover is (supposedly) offering her.  This is no simple tale of the loss of innocence, for our young heroine who smokes and sings along to Juliette Greco songs longs for experience and the sophisticated life.  The real loss is in her future -- the future she will sacrifice if she pursues the so-called bright promises of the present.  Set in the early 60s, at the beginning of an era of sexual liberation, An Education reminds us that a price was paid by those who sought freedom from the constraints of the old system.  And by those who resisted the temptations as well.

And although I think we can agree that girls have more to lose in the process, then and now, I would suggest that boys have been known to be seduced as well, along much the same lines as a matter of fact, and therefore An Education has a slightly more universal appeal, at least in some quarters, than might generally be acknowledged. 

"A handsome man seduces a youth with promises of a trip to Paris," a friend wrote to me when the trailer for the film first appeared.  "It might have happened to any one of us."

"It did," I wrote back.

"Darling," came the reply, "giving up your virture in the cab of a big rig for a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon hardly counts as the same thing."

This, of course, is where our previous discussions on perspective (see below) will come in handy.  What exactly do we mean by seduction?  What kind of an education are we talking about? 

To be continued.