Audrey Chamberlain Foote of Washington. D.C., educator, translator, feminist, animal rights advocate and longtime seasonal Chilmark visitor, died at her home April 3 after long bouts with cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. She was 85.

She first visited the Vineyard with her husband, Timothy, on their East Chop honeymoon in 1948. The Footes made it a practice ever afterward — except for eight years when they were living in Paris — to spend a part of each summer on the Island.

In a piece she wrote for the Gazette in 1982, Audrey Foote recounted her love affair with the Vineyard. “Through our first decade of Vineyard visits, we rented six different houses around Menemsha Pond; the second decade we returned each year to the same house off Flanders Lane . . . Entering the house the first time each summer . . . I step out on the deck over the vast tangle of grape and honeysuckle, and I begin to count the strata of land and water from the jungle below, to the horizon, first the reedy marsh with narrow rivulets only otters navigate; the blue band of the little bay. Then the first island crowned with glossy poison ivy, circled by terns; another strip of blue water and a flat and narrow bar of sand and reeds. Finally, the glittering broad span of the channel and the pond and the sandy point and dunes of Lobsterville.”

She remembered the happy ritual of beach picnics each summer — the annual highlight was the July 14 Bastille Day picnic on the outer beach facing Nashawena with her friends Ceil Harrison, Alida Stange and Suzanne Roddy. She wrote about how it was agreeable to meet new people at Chilmark cocktail parties, but what really mattered was “being with those once agreeable acquaintances who have become dear friends.”

Fifteen years later, in a September, 1999 diary entry, she described one of her last happy Vineyard interludes:

“Arrived in time for unpacking, supper and a spectacular flame-colored sunset . . . Joy to be here at Quitsa. Both of us adore this marvelous house [the Mitchell Ryersons’] on the most gorgeous 11 acres on the Island, a peninsula into Menemsha Pond.

“Woke this a.m. to sun and love. We had a bracing swim on Short Beach . . . Another glorious sunset as we had supper.”

She told of how one of the three family dogs (there were always dogs and cats as well as children in the family entourage) got skunked. She described sailing and canoeing on Quitsa, with the dogs swimming after the canoe or following along shore, to an isolated inlet where there was a blue heron rookery. She concluded her entries of 13 years ago: “A most beautiful place. Hope to come here as long as I live.”

Audrey Chamberlain was born July 29, 1926, in New York city, a daughter of Florabel (Leggett) Chamberlain and Warren Chamberlain. She was a 1948 graduate of Wellesley College, where she majored in English and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1949, she received a master’s degree from Harvard, and a doctorate in comparative literature from Columbia University in 1986.

While living in Paris, where her husband was a foreign correspondent for Life and Time magazines, she worked as a researcher for Time and contributed to a guidebook on Paris. In 1971, she translated into English the novel The Raft of the Medusa by the French novelist Jean Bruller, who wrote under the nom de plume Vercors. She also taught literature classes at Columbia University in New York and George Washington and American Universities in Washington and lectured on literature and drama at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. She was a regular book reviewer — often of works on feminist topics — for the Washington Post. She had also written for the Atlantic Monthly.

A vegetarian from the age of 10, she was a devoted animal lover and, in the 1960s, helped to run the Underdog Railroad, an adoption program for dogs bound for euthanasia in Washington pounds. She also volunteered with the animal rights group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Over the years, she and her husband had taken in 70 abandoned puppies and found them safe homes.

Audrey Foote is remembered not only for her intellect, her unfailing devotion to animals, her support of feminism and her love for her family, but for the courage, graciousness and charm that never left her.

She is survived by her husband of 63 years, of Washington, and their children, Colin Foote of Roscoe, N.Y., Victoria Blackman of McLean, Va., Valerie Foote of Silver Spring, Md., and Andrew Todhunter of Santa Rosa, Calif., and four grandchildren.