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A Girl in the Bodleian: Mary Ward's Room of Her Own

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

John Sutherland
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Extract

Founded in medieval monasticism, the University of Oxford has always been nervous about women on its premises. For six hundred years, the other sex was comprehensively shut out. It was not until 1879 (some time after Cambridge) that a token few female students were admitted at the collegiate enclave of Somerville (Mallet 432). Oxford dons were bound to formal celibacy until the 1870s. And even after the erosion of this rule, women continued to be seen as fatal presences at the university: a fear burlesqued in Max Beerbohm's novel Zuleika Dobson (1911), where the arrival of one sexually desirable girl drives the whole of Oxford's undergraduate population to lemming-like suicide in the Isis.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 16 , Spring 1988 , pp. 169 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

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