Women's University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II Vol 3

Book excerpt: The years 1890-1945 saw an unprecedented outpouring of fiction focused on British university life, much of it reflecting the drastic change that had swept through the higher education system in the late nineteenth century. Among these narratives, a significant subgroup focused on the lives of women students, newly admitted to the structures of higher education system, their presence still stridently, and sometimes even violently, opposed, especially at Oxbridge. These novels and short stories collected here, largely unknown today, were widely discussed and debated in the public sphere during the early twentieth century, contributing not only to the formation of public knowledge and opinion about education through cultural figures like the ‘Girton Girl’ or the ‘undergraduette,’ but also sparking debate about many wider social and cultural issues, from the place of the women writer in the literary scene to the emergence of new discourses around psychology and the body. The majority have not been reprinted since their original publication, and until now have been rarely available to scholars. The publication of Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, therefore, provides a major new resource for scholarship in many areas, including women’s studies, educational history, and literary and cultural modernism.