Underneath the dreaming spires of Oxford’s world-famous university, generations of women have lived their lives, fighting for the right to study there, and for a role within the city’s educational, political and social spheres. Although a few of these women’s names have been recorded for posterity, they have been largely because of their association with worthy or famous men; in this book, though, their own lives are detailed, along with those who have been largely omitted from history. Women’s lives have always been less recorded than those of men; where a woman helped her husband with his business, this help may not have been formally recorded in the census returns, and the details of jobs recorded there might not reflect the full-scale of women’s work and responsibilities. So here, learn about the variety of work women undertook; their education, their social lives, and their attempts to carve out a valuable role for themselves. Learn too of the problems they faced in living their lives: poverty, prison, suicide, or even murder. This is no pretty picture of Oxford life designed for tourist brochures; instead, it aims to take a snapshot of the varied experiences of the city’s female population over the course of a century.

By reading the work of the British modernists - Dorothy Richardson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mary Butts and Virginia Woolf - through the lens of material culture, this text argues that women's imaginative work is inseparable from their ambivalent, complicated relation to Britain's imperial history.

Long overlooked in standard reference works, pioneering women medievalists finally receive their due in Women Medievalists and the Academy. This comprehensive edited volume brings to life a diverse collection of inspiring figures through memoirs, biographical essays, and interviews. Covering many different nationalities and academic disciplines—including literature, philology, history, archaeology, art history, theology or religious studies, and philosophy—each essay delves into one woman’s life, intellectual contributions, and efforts to succeed in a male-dominated field. Together, these extraordinary personal histories constitute a new standard reference that speaks to a growing interest in women’s roles in the development of scholarship and the academy. The collection begins in the eighteenth century with Elizabeth Elstob and continues to the present, and includes—among more than seventy profiles—such important figures as Anna Jameson, Lina Eckenstein, Georgiana Goddard King, Eileen Power, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dorothy Whitelock, Susan Mosher Stuard, Marcia Colish, and Caroline Walker Bynum, among others.

"In this study, Isobel Hurst brings together two lines of enquiry in recent criticism: the Romantic and Victorian reception of ancient Greece and Rome, and women as writers and readers in the nineteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.

"Pioneering. . . . An important and timely collection that profiles the lives and professional careers of women medievalists in the last centuries."--Maureen Mazzaoui, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The rise of the middle classes brought a sharp increase in the number of young men and women able to attend university. Developing in the wake of this increase, the university novel often centred on male undergraduates at either Oxford or Cambridge. Bogen argues that an analysis of the lesser known female narratives can provide new insights.