KENT—For many people, life is a seamless progression, a journey that prompts no introspection about conflicting influences, good or bad. The awareness of a dichotomy in her life came as a surprise to English literature professor and author Betty Krasne when she sat down to write her fourth book, a book that would look back at her life as the child of an emigrant Russian father and a socially correct bourgeoisie mother.

Balanced against the predictable, conservative life they offered their children was the “dangerous” terrain that education opened before her. Indeed, Ms. Krasne, a Kent resident, chose to call her book “A Dangerous Thing.” She will have a reading of her book, which was published in July by BooksSurge, at the Kent Library at 4 p.m. on Nov. 4.

“When I set out to discover how we came to be ‘the way we were,’ I assumed this was a simple task, for which I was adequately prepared,” she wrote in the introduction to her book. “I could read, I could write. I would send out letters to relatives, collect some family lore, read over the articles I had written over the years and the job would be done.... I had already written three books and 60 articles for publications such as the New York Times and The Litchfield County Times,” said Ms. Krasne in a telephone interview this week.... “But, when I re-read my articles, I realized there were two very different types of articles represented and that the stories they told didn’t stitch together well.”

She set out to reconcile the two halves of her life experience, dividing her book into three related themes. “My book is divided into three sections,” she said. “First, the world of my grandparents and what education meant to them and therefore what happened in their generation. Second is how it brought very different things into my life-how it resulted in conflict and how it played out. The third section focuses on my teaching career and my kids’ educations and the conflicts I feel about that....

“The Victorian division of duties between male and female and a woman’s role in the middle-class home was still the way of the world into which I was born in 1933,” she wrote. “Separate was equal on Central Park West. Like a European political detente, there were his and her spheres of influence.... Ms. Krasne and her older sister were exposed to a liberal education from early childhood. “We were allowed to go, because what else could you do with a girl?” she said. “They didn’t care what I did. I thought I would be a brain surgeon.”

That goal was abandoned, but she did earn an undergraduate degree at Mount Holyoke College, followed by an MA from Columbia and a Ph.D. from Union Graduate School. She