The Dreaming Spires: Books Set in Oxford

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Among the most famous books set in Oxford (without mentioning it) are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Even more than the books themselves, I’m fascinated by the story of the shy mathematician Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and his friendship with Alice Liddell, the daughter of the head of Christ Church College. Based on stories he made up to amuse Alice and her sisters on a boat trip on a hot afternoon, Wonderland is recognizably based on Oxford. 

In 2011, I was fortunate to do a weeklong course on English Country Houses which gave me the privilege of living “in college” at Christ Church. After having peered longingly at the Christ Church Fellows Garden countless times through the iron gates on Broad Walk, I finally made it inside—and it was as magical as I could have imagined, especially with dusk falling and the bell from Tom Tower tolling its nightly 101 strokes. It’s easy to see the college’s influence on Wonderland—with its long corridors, secret gardens, locked doors, and hilariously arbitrary rules like “Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.”

One of my favorite recent book series set in Oxford is Evie Dunmore’s League of Extraordinary Women, which includes Bringing Down the Duke (2019), A Rogue of One’s Own (2020), Portrait of a Scotsman (2021) and The Gentleman’s Gambit (2023). Dunmore combines the Victorian struggle for women’s rights, especially their right to vote and to receive an education from universities like Oxford, with spicy, even scandalous romance, an unusual but somehow deeply satisfying combination. 

Though I’ve found many series get better as they go on, I feel the opposite about the Extraordinary Women books. My favorite remains Bringing Down the Duke, the story of Annabelle Archer, who, to keep her scholarship at Oxford, agrees to recruit influential men to champion the cause of women’s suffrage. But when she’s assigned to the powerful, politically calculating Duke of Montgomery, Sebastian Devereux, passionate sparks fly on both sides. 

It’s a brilliant set-up because the male-female tension is inherent from the start, and even as you root for Annabelle and Sebastian’s romance, you’re forced to confront the inequalities between them as well as the stifling social conventions governing relationships between Victorian men and women. Annabelle must be chaperoned by an older woman everywhere she goes in Oxford, because “women were not allowed to enter the town center unescorted, nor could they be alone with a professor.” 

As Annabelle hurries down St. Giles street (with her chaperone), “she would have liked to meander and soak up the sight of the enchanting sandstone walls . . . but they were running late. . . . She could still feel the withered stones of the old structures, emanating centuries-old knowledge and an air of mystery. She had peeked through one of the medieval doors in the wall . . . catching a glimpse of one of the beautiful gardens of the men’s colleges that lay beyond, a little island of exotic trees and late-blooming flowers and hidden nooks, locked away like a gem in a jewelry box. Someday, she might find a way to sneak inside.”

But for Annabelle and her sister suffragettes, Lady Lucie Tedbury, Hattie Greenfield, and Catriona Campbell, that day is far in the future. For now, they’re fighting to repeal Britain’s Married Women’s Property Act, which essentially stripped women of equal status as men before the law. In A Rogue of One’s Own (my second favorite in the series), Lucie acknowledges to herself that “unless the act was amended or abolished altogether, she would lose her small trust fund to any future husband upon marriage, along with her name and legal personhood, and she would, quite literally, become a possession.”

This fact, shocking as it is to modern sensibilities, creates the perfect impediment to romance. And yet, Lucie still finds it hard to resist the rakish Tristan Ballentine when he proposes an outrageously scandalous business deal, and the tension is delicious.

Though Hattie’s story, Portrait of a Scotsman, has some nice moments, I find it more problematic. After they’re caught kissing, Hattie will be “ruined” in society if she doesn’t marry Lucian Blackstone, so she does, having no real idea of Lucian’s difficult past or the darker aspects of his character. And though they eventually come to understand one another, the novel ends in a way I found unsatisfying.

Catriona’s story, The Gentleman’s Gambit, was the most unsatisfying for me. She’s a prickly, difficult character, and I felt like the series was running out of steam. Catriona faces the temptation to help attractive Middle Eastern scholar Elias Khoury, who’s pretending he’s come to Oxford to study ancient artifacts, but really wants to return them to his homeland, Lebanon. The question of who has the rights to past antiquities is such a fraught one (to this day) that its weight is almost too heavy for the novel to bear. 

The thing that redeemed The Gentleman’s Gambit for me was the epilogue, set in 1918, which reunites the four friends in London, along with their husbands, children and even grandchildren, on the day of the first general election in which women (over 30) could vote. 

There are so many other books set in Oxford that it’s hard to choose. Colin Dexter with his Inspector Morse series and Philip Pullman with the His Dark Materials trilogy have both left their own literary marks on the city (or perhaps the city has left its mark on them—?) Like Sayers, Barbara Pym was one of the first women students, and Oxford settings feature in her charming novels Jane and Prudence and Crampton Hodnet. And on the list of “famous” Oxford novels I always see Zuleika Dobson (1911) by Max Beerbohm, but I’ve never been able to get past that title!

So, I’ve saved what I believe is the best Oxford novel for last, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night. Having survived the scandal of being tried—and acquitted—for the murder of her lover, Harriet Vane accepts an invitation to return to a class reunion known as a “Gaudy” at her old Oxford college, Shrewsbury, a fictional women’s college loosely based on Sayers’s alma mater, Somerville. When someone starts sending poison pen letters to the women students and dons, and it appears they must be coming from “in college,” (the unsettling side of that restricted access), Harriet is called upon to help. As rumors and accusations fly, the integrity of the college teeters in the balance, threatening the women scholars’ tenuous standing in the wider, male-dominated academic world. 

I reread Gaudy Night almost once a year and, besides the pleasure of tracing Harriet’s steps around Oxford, one of the things that always strikes me is how timely the questions about women, their rights and roles in the world remains.