Lapsing by Jill Patton Walsh (St. Martin's, 1987)

 

This is a novel about a young English woman named Tessa.  Tessa is a devout Catholic and most of the novel centers around her years in Oxford (evoked in great detail) in the early 1960s, where she studies literature and is a member of a Catholic students group led by Father Theodore, a brilliant, beautiful, and charismatic mathematician/priest, who Tessa falls (platonically, she thinks) in love with.  She misguidedly marries Ben, a fellow Catholic student, so that they can provide a home for Father Theodore, but of course this doomed menage self-destructs and in what seems to be a hastily appended flash-forward, we learn that Tessa has found a new life as a fabric artist in the United States.

Tessa is a naive and sometimes unbelievably clueless character, but Patton Walsh is a good and smart writer who elevates this story above the dubious plot and makes it into an interesting exploration of faith and love.