Most of my personal memories of Jane Marcus revolve around food. A year ago, during spring semester, while I was teaching four classes in a row at John Jay College-CUNY, the last two in a building which can only be described as decrepit—windowless, airless, no faculty lounge, furniture nailed to the floor—Jane and her beloved husband Michael, Mike, Big Mike, insisted I come up to their apartment each Tuesday and Thursday evening in between classes three and four for dinner. I had a 50-minute break in between. I'm like, “Ohhhh, mannnn, I don't know if I have enough time.” But Jane insisted. She said, “You need SUSTENANCE!”

So every Tuesday and Thursday night, I'd jump on the bus or hop in a cab at 59th and 10th and ride up to their apartment on 73rd Street for dinner. Well, it wasn't just a quick bite. It was grilled salmon and asparagus one night, brisket another, salad greens and vegetables from their garden, duck confit (I didn't even know what duck confit was; it turns out it's delicious), followed by dessert, usually ice cream drizzled with preserves she had canned over the summer, and, yes, a glass (or two) of wine. I'd walk back into class with 30 seconds to spare, fed and renewed by our conversation, and teach with an energy I had found lacking in class number three.

Because Jane was right. I needed sustenance. For, “one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well” (AROO 18). We need sustenance “so that,” as Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One's Own (1929), we are “able to draw up to the fire and repair some of the damages of the day's living” (AROO 19). Jane Marcus gave me—and so many of the scholars in this room—personal, intellectual, and professional sustenance. As one of her students, Rowena Kennedy Epstein, posted on social media, “It is such a unique relationship to mourn—through it one becomes part of a community, is someone else's legacy, gets a job, is given permission, makes another network of legacies, moves somewhere, publishes, thinks, writes, gains authority. It's profound when it is nurturing,” and Jane nurtured all of us in this way.