INTRODUCTION: DREAMING SPIRES

This is the sort of novel every young woman at university reading English imagines she can write There is something peculiarly touching about the details of daily life that [she] includes, even if her characters are stereotypes and sticks. She describes the bathtubs in Somerville College, water running down her arms when she punts, college gardens, electric kettles, coffee bars, the Bodleian library, as though these things had never been seen or described before. This has a curious effect on the reader, for they have in fact been described so often that they have a kind of banal mythic force [She] might write well if she had something to write about. And why is not Oxford, and young love, and Shakespeare something, I do ask myself. Because it fills me with a kind of nausea I suspect would not be peculiar to me. It is dj vu in its youth and newness. It is a reason why sensitive young women should refrain from writing sensitive young novels about Oxbridge. All the same, having done these pages, she might do something else? A. S. Byatt, Babel Tower (1996), pp. 1545 Oxford has been fortunate in her novelists; they have rarely been brilliant but they have never been unkind. Norman Longmate, Oxford Triumphant (1954), p. 153

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Frederic Raphael, The Glittering Prizes (1976), p. 27

So this is the city of dreaming spires, Sheila said. Theoretically, thats Oxford, Adam said. This is the city of perspiring dreams.

To describe a text as any sort of institutional fiction necessarily implies a vexed relationship to the institution depicted. Despite its air of post-modern jokiness, the quotation directly above, taken from Raphaels 1976 novel The Glittering Prizes, neatly highlights the central and often emotionally wrenching tension that lies at the heart of university fiction, between the realities of educational experience and the privileged cultural position occupied by the idea of the university. As Raphaels pun suggests, in university fiction, dreaming spires and perspiring dreams function as complementary and related aspects of the tex1

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tual university. Not only is the former frequently used as a romantic backdrop for exploration of the latter, but, in a subgenre in which almost all authors are recent products of the institutions they describe, the act of writing itself is implicated in the very experience it tries to capture. Nor is the act of reading university fiction free from this type of ideological baggage; Paul Deslandess confession in the opening pages of Oxbridge Men that, as an outsider, he first experienced and became fascinated with Oxbridge culture through fiction is one that represents a normative, although certainly not universal, reading experience. University fiction forces the reader to consider not only the place of university life in the world, but necessitates a renegotiation of his or her own position towards university life, a position that may range from Deslandess feeling of alienation the sense of separation I felt from this world was palpable1 to the sense of almost celebratory ownership displayed by studies like Elaine Showalters Faculty Towers (2005). What this diversity of reading/ writing approaches suggests is that university fiction has an important role to play in both reflecting and shaping cultural views of the nature and purpose of higher education. In my own study of university fiction, perhaps for some of the same reasons that Deslandes admits to in the opening of his study, I have chosen to focus on those who regarded themselves as outsiders. The study considers full-length fictional narratives written about British student life by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during a time in which both higher education generally, and the education of women in particular, were undergoing rapid expansion and change. My selection of novels requires some explanation; shared generic characteristics rather than setting have been my main tool of categorization.2 I deliberately chose to focus only on novels describing student life at universities; unlike today, most university fiction of the period describes the lives of students rather than the faculty politics of later novels like David Lodges Changing Places or Malcolm Bradburys The History Man. When I refer to university fiction, therefore, unless explicitly stated I refer to novels of student experience, the Oxbridge Bildungsroman which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 1. Another factor in the decision to narrow down my source texts has been more practical. No studies of the British womens university novel exist and as a result, most bibliographical sources remain remarkably incomplete.3 Identifying and locating university novels, many of which were not considered of lasting literary value at the time of their publication, has been an exciting but difficult task. Of the fiction that is accessible, the vast majority is set at Oxford and Cambridge, where, perhaps not coincidentally, women experienced one of the most challenging and visible struggles to gain admission and equal status as undergraduates.4 Carol Dyhouse sums up what appears to be the general view among historians of womens education when she points out that Oxford and Cam-

Introduction

bridge, where women were not granted degrees until 1919 and 1948 respectively, occupied a conservative position relative to other higher education institutions: Oxford and Cambridge can in the main be seen as having functioned to confirm privilege rather than to offer opportunities for social mobility.5 Dyhouses own pioneering study of women in civic universities, No Distinction of Sex?: Women in British Universities 18701939, also confirms this hypothesis. By concentrating on Oxford and Cambridge fiction, I do not in any way argue that it can or should be read as broadly representative of womens experience in higher education at the time; on the contrary, the abnormal conditions within the ancient universities often contribute to the fictions idiosyncrasies, confirming and complicating class issues with gender politics. Indeed, my focus on Oxford and Cambridge fiction has not only shaped but also indicates the direction of my approach. Any purely historical study of womens widening access to higher education would benefit much more from nonfiction primary source material by female students at redbrick universities, in which the larger history of feminist struggle is perhaps more directly reflected. Instead of being primarily historical, my study aims to offer a mediated account focusing on the interaction of genre, narrative and history the aim here is not only to examine how university fiction represents Oxford or Cambridge, but equally, to examine how institutional representation shapes and distorts fictional patterns. While I do not deny the historical importance and political relevance of university fiction, therefore, I approach it as a literary scholar whose foremost interest is in the texts internal politics. When those internal tensions point towards a definable external impact, I have noted it; otherwise, I have tried not to draw unsupported real-world conclusions. The history of access to higher education is, in one sense, too important to be left to novelists to document; in another sense, the novels themselves, despite their varying literary quality, are too complex to be flattened into convenient historical exemplars. My approach to these novels, therefore, has been twofold. I have used the structure of the Bildungsroman as a starting point for analysis, building on the work of scholars and theorists to investigate how female writers negotiated the ideological demands of this form while trying to represent the uncomfortable realities of their lives at university. Each chapter then grounds its literary analysis in a specific historical context based on memoirs, letters and autobiographies and the writings of educational historians, in order to illuminate and challenge the novels presentation of the university experience. This volume aims to show readers not only what these novels reveal about a very understudied area of womens experience, but also how and why the novels structurally reposition and distort that experience in order to comment on the Bildungsroman itself. In each chapter I have included a range of primary university texts about women, published between 1894 and 1945. In most cases I have also included at least

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one text about male students, less for the purpose of contrast than to demonstrate to the reader the generic elements that would have served as models for many women writers of the period. The chapters are organized thematically and are not meant to suggest any sort of progressive teleology; I have come to the conclusion that certainly before World War II, continuity generally outweighed change in university fiction. The novels I have chosen to focus on therefore reflect particular debates in the history of women at university. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for the study by focusing on the history of the university novel within the larger category of the Bildungsroman and examining authors and audiences to gauge how university fiction was being read. Chapter 2 focuses on the representation of liberal education and looks at Barbara Silvers 1935 novel Our Young Barbarians against the backdrop of Compton Mackenzies hugely popular 1914 novel Sinister Street. I then move on in Chapter 3 to examine the impact of organized religion at Oxbridge in Gertrude Winifred Taylors soul-searching novel The Pearl (1918) and Mary Wilkess The Only Door Out (1945), reading both texts against Shane Leslies novel The Cantab (1926). Chapter 4 focuses on issues of place and locality within the Bildungsroman, reading four texts through the lens of contemporary arguments about the home, the university and the local; here I examine two texts of the pre-war era, Jessie Vaizeys A College Girl (1914) and Ivor Browns Years of Plenty (1915), before going on to look at some more unusual novels of the thirties, Ruth Goldrings Educating Joanna (1935) and Mary Sturts Be Gentle to the Young (1937). Chapter 5 turns more directly to politics, dipping into Gerard Hopkinss A City in the Foreground (1921) before going on to two haunting novels of the twenties, Vera Brittains The Dark Tide (1923) and Rene Hayness Neapolitan Ice (1928). Chapter 6 considers Oxbridge interwar literary culture, examining Beverley Nicholss autobiographical novel Patchwork (1921) and Rose Marie Hodgsons experimental university novel Rosy-Fingered Dawn (1934). The final chapter focuses on the presentation of sexuality within the university fiction of the period. I examine two of the oldest texts, Tivolis Une Culotte, or, A New Woman: An Impossible Tale of Modern Oxford (1894) and the prolific L. T. Meades The Girls of Merton College (1912) against some giants of the university novel subgenre, Rosamond Lehmanns dreamy Dusty Answer (1927), Virginia Woolf s short story A Womans College from the Outside (1926) and Gertrude Eileen Trevelyans disturbing 1933 thriller Hot-House. In the conclusion, I look briefly at Philip Larkins Jill (1946) as an exemplar of the changes wrought in the subgenre by World War II. I have restricted analysis of each primary text to the chapter in which it appears because my approach necessitates a holistic reading; the texts function less as documentary evidence than as case studies, each one peculiar and complex. The conclusions drawn about the genre as a whole necessarily involve many exceptions and are not meant to be

Introduction

anything but broadly representative. They rest not only on the analysis presented within the study, but on substantial reading of university fiction not analysed in detail here, a partial list of which appears in the appendix. In the following chapter, therefore, I will briefly trace the theoretical underpinnings of the this study by looking at the theory of the Bildungsroman and the history of the university novel. I then conclude the chapter with a historical overview of the production and reception of these texts.

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