To mark the solar eclipse over North America of 8 April 2024, I’m republishing this post which featured in my first week on Substack. The story begins with Virginia Woolf recording her sense of awe after seeing the total eclipse over Yorkshire in 1927.
This essay is the first part of my afterword for the 2023 Recovered Books reissue of Gertrude Trevelyan’s 1938 masterpiece, William’s Wife. It’s about Virginia Woolf’s lecture at Oxford in May 1927 called ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’ and how, a month later, a young undergraduate called Gertrude Trevelyan became the first woman to win Oxford University’s most prestigious poetry prize. It was a huge achievement at a time when the rights of Oxford’s women students were being contested yet again, despite - or perhaps because of - their success. If you would like to receive future posts exploring Cambridge women’s histories & hidden corners of literature straight to your mailbox, you can subscribe as a free or paid member by clicking the button below.
Connecting threads, Part One
On 29 June 1927, in the early hours of the morning, a total solar eclipse could be seen from parts of the United Kingdom. It was the first to be visible in England for over two hundred years,[i] and Londoners who could afford the 18-shilling return fare took a special overnight train from King’s Cross to north Yorkshire to witness the extraordinary spectacle. ‘How can I express the darkness? It was a sudden plunge,’ Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary. ‘Also to be picked out of one’s London drawing room and set down on the wildest moors in England was impressive.’[ii]
The following day, at Oxford, another extraordinary event took place. At the University’s annual ‘Encaenia’ ceremony held at the Sheldonian Theatre, a young student called Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan, aged 24, was presented with the Newdigate Prize for her 250-line poem in blank verse, ‘Julia, Daughter of Claudius’ (later published as a limited edition by Basil Blackwell). The value of the prize may have been small in financial terms - a cheque for £21 - but its reputation was mighty. Founded in 1806, Sir Roger Newdigate’s Prize was given annually to an Oxford University student for the best composition in verse of under 300 lines. It had previously been won by John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and Oscar Wilde. Now, for the first time, a woman had been awarded the University’s most prestigious literary prize.
The Encaenia is always a special, celebratory day in the University of Oxford’s academic calendar, but in 1927 few male undergraduates were present to watch Trevelyan collect her cheque. This may have been because excitement about the eclipse had been building for months, and most university men had left the city earlier that week, hoping to get the best vantage point. ‘This,’ the Oxford Times asserted, ‘doubtless explained the presence in the gallery of many undergraduettes in their quaint hats.’[iii] But the female students who crowded into the Sheldonian Theatre that day, proudly wearing their academic gowns and caps, were there for a very good reason. They knew how hard their predecessors had fought for them to have the right to study and earn a degree at Oxford. For them, seeing a woman undergraduate awarded their university’s most prestigious literary prize was as momentous an event as viewing a total solar eclipse.
A few weeks before, Virginia Woolf had travelled to Oxford to give a lecture to undergraduates, an acknowledgement of her achievements as the author of critically acclaimed novels including Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925).[iv] The trip was a useful distraction for Woolf, who was feeling anxious about her new novel, To the Lighthouse, published on 5 May 1927. She knew that its daring, experimental style might be challenging for some readers and she was waiting to hear the literary critics’ verdict. ‘I know why I am depressed,’ she wrote in her diary on the book’s publication day. ‘A bad habit of making up the review I should like before reading the review I get.’[v]
Good reviews mattered to Woolf. Positive comments would translate into reprints by the Hogarth Press, the tiny publishing press that she and her husband Leonard Woolf had jointly run for ten years.[vi] Healthy book sales would also mean a corresponding increase in her income. ‘It is misleading to think of her as indifferent to financial matters, in spite of her capital and her private Press,’ Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee writes. ‘She was intensely conscious of her value in the market-place.’[vii] Woolf need not have worried about To the Lighthouse. Its success proved to be a turning point in her career, confirming her reputation as a novelist, and for the first time her income as a writer rose higher than that of her husband .
Woolf's 1927 Oxford lecture was entitled ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, and she was pleased to see what she called ‘the youth of both sexes’ crammed into the lecture hall.[viii] Male undergraduates still outnumbered female ones at Oxford, but in Woolf’s eyes, having a mixed audience was a visible sign of progress. She had always regretted missing the opportunity to read Classics at Cambridge. When she was a young woman, her father and former Cambridge don Leslie Stephen had explained that there was not enough money for Virginia and her sister to follow in their brothers’ footsteps there. The injustice of this stayed with Woolf for years[ix] and she did not hide her contempt for Oxbridge men who, because of their education, behaved as if they were effortlessly superior to her. ‘Her rage was fuelled by competitiveness,’ Lee notes. ‘It was she, not any of them who was going to be the great writer.’[x]
As a final-year student of English with a passion for literature, Gertrude Trevelyan likely would have attended Woolf’s lecture in 1927. Because contemporary fiction was changing so rapidly, Woolf, said, no one could predict its future; but ‘the next ten years will certainly upset it; the next century will blow it to the winds.’[xi] Listening to these words, did Trevelyan dare to envisage her own future as an experimental and challenging writer? The eight novels she would produce during the next ten years certainly confirmed Woolf's prediction.
Gertrude Trevelyan's early literary ambitions are hard to guess. Born in 1903, she was the only surviving child of upper-middle-class parents and she grew up near Bath in Somerset. As a teenager she attended Princess Helena College, a girls’ boarding school then based in Ealing, west London, where she won the school’s essay-writing prize two years in a row but gave few other indications of literary promise. In 1923, Trevelyan went up to Lady Margaret Hall without a prestigious scholarship but with a view to getting a degree, perhaps unaware of what a significant achievement this already was.
By then, women had been studying at Oxford for over fifty years, but similarly to Cambridge, the University’s governing body, or Council, had steadfastly refused to accept them as full members or award them degrees. After the First World War, however, there was a determination among many people to make a better, fairer world, and in 1920, three years before Trevelyan began her studies, a vote was passed by Council permitting women students to graduate with full Oxford BA and MA honours. It was a milestone in the University's history.
The special graduation ceremony to mark the occasion took place at the Sheldonian Theatre on 14 October 1920, and the mood was described in the Oxford Times as one of ‘excitement’ and ‘bewilderment’. Eleanor Jourdain, the Principal of St Hugh’s college, called it ‘a woman’s day, and a day for women to remember.’[xii] Among the first cohort of graduates was the writer Vera Brittain, future author of Testament of Youth (1933) and The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History (1960), and the crime writer Dorothy L. Sayers. Years later, in Gaudy Night (1935), Sayers brilliantly captured the lifelong significance of an Oxford degree for her fictional alter ego, the detective Harriet Vane:‘Whatever I may have done since, this remains,’ Vane reminds herself. ‘Scholar; Master of Arts; Domina; Senior Member of this University’.[xiii]
When Gertrude Trevelyan arrived in Oxford in 1923 it was a time of renewed confidence among women academics and students, who seemed at last to be catching up with their male peers in meaningful ways. According to the Oxford classicist and lecturer Gilbert Murray, female undergraduates ‘were certainly more remarkable and interesting than the majority of the men.’[xiv] They included Mary Renault, the future historical novelist who studied at St Hugh’s from 1925 (and spent her spare time practising dagger-throwing), and her contemporary Elizabeth Pakenham (née Harman), already famous for her beauty and brilliance, who would become a respected historian and the mother of Lady Antonia Fraser.[xv] In 1926, four out of Oxford’s five women’s colleges and halls, including Lady Margaret Hall, were awarded their Royal Charter, officially placing them for the first time on an equal footing with the male colleges. It was another important step forward.
It’s revealing that Trevelyan chose to study English, which as a new academic discipline at Oxford and Cambridge was breaking adventurous ground (as Woolf implied) in the study of modern writers. Otherwise, it’s hard to be certain of what Trevelyan gained from her student experience. She later summed up her time at Oxford in terms of her acute sense of difference from her fellow students. ‘Did not: play hockey, act, row, take part in debates, political or literary, contribute to the Isis or attend cocoa parties, herein failing to conform to the social standards commonly required of women students’, she wrote, archly.[xvi]
Trevelyan’s rejection of the upper-class Oxbridge female stereotype is characteristic of her refusal to conform, but it may also indicate more serious health difficulties that led her to take four years, instead of the usual three, to complete her degree. In 1933, living in London, she wrote that, apart from winning the Newdigate Prize, her chief accomplishments at Oxford were developing ‘smokers’ throat and a taste for misanthrophic reflection, which occupation she has since pursued at Fulham, Notting Hill and elsewhere.’ [xvii] The ‘smokers’ throat’ she so casually refers to might have been the first signs of the pulmonary tuberculosis which would become a serious condition in her thirties. Other clues to her unhappiness at Oxford lie in one of her earliest novels, Hot-house (1933), in which an older female tutor at a fictional Oxford women’s college discusses the unsuitability of Mina, the Trevelyan-like protagonist, for university life: ‘Rather unbalanced, you know. Nerves and so on. Not quite the right thing for the college, perhaps.’[xviii]
Although Trevelyan felt as if she didn’t fit in at Oxford, her first published work was about to make her a heroine to many women there. Her narrative poem ‘Julia, Daughter of Claudius’ was inspired by an account in John Addington Symonds’s seven-volume book, Renaissance in Italy (1875-86), telling the story of how in 1485 a Roman sarcophagus was discovered by workmen digging up the Appian Way. Inside was the body of a fifteen-year-old Roman girl, her beauty perfectly preserved. (‘Awake! For Julia lives. Awake!/ For beauty is not dead.’[xix]) Symonds' history relates that the girl's body was taken to the Vatican City and displayed in a marble coffin. But when growing numbers of pilgrims demanded to see this ‘miraculous’ corpse, Pope Innocent VIII began to feel that his position as leader of the orthodox faith might be threatened. To prevent this new and powerful pagan cult from developing further, he had the body removed and secretly buried at night, leaving Julia's coffin empty.
For a time, it seemed as if the twentieth-century equivalent of a literary cult was building around Gertrude Trevelyan. The news of the first woman to win Oxford's Newdigate Prize was reported around the English-speaking world, from The Times in London to the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser in Australia. ‘Miss Trevelyan's verse shows promise and power, and a sweep of diction none too common in modern poetry,’ the Spectator critic wrote on 25 June 1927 and the Daily Mail predicted that her ‘future work will be watched with interest’.[xx] Trevelyan herself did not take all the fuss too seriously, claiming never to have written verse before and telling the Mail that she wrote the poem ‘for a joke’. Years later, recalling the excitement surrounding her award, she drily observed that all the publicity was probably due to astonishment at ‘evident revolutionary tendencies at work in the University.’
The ‘revolutionary tendencies’ that Trevelyan referred to were connected to the increasingly contested place of women at Oxford in the second half of the 1920s. In the seven years since they had been permitted degrees, female students had been enrolling at the University in ever greater numbers and the male authorities were becoming alarmed. For conservative members of the University, the headline news that a woman student had won the Newdigate Prize may also have been a tipping point. On 14 June 1927, a proposal to limit the number of women undergraduates was debated in the Sheldonian Theatre. The Principal of Somerville College spoke passionately against the motion. ‘We are sick of the disabilities of our sex,’ she said. ‘We feel bound to hand on the privileges we have inherited as unchanged as possible to our successors.’[xxi] Many of the more progressive male dons agreed with her, including the Balliol classicist Cyril Bailey, who said: ‘Many members of the University would feel a deep sense of shame if Oxford said to the world “No more women need apply.”’ But the proposal was passed by the majority and a new statute drafted capping the number of female students at 840, one sixth of the total complement of undergraduates, for the foreseeable future.
Just two weeks later, Gertrude Trevelyan walked up to the stage of the Sheldonian to claim her prize for a poem that described what happened when a powerful world leader felt threatened by a fifteen-year-old girl (even though that girl happened to be long dead). Her Julia, Daughter of Claudius might appear to be a fanciful tale, but its symbolism is telling. That month the University of Oxford had demonstrated that the men were still in control and could take away a woman’s powers and 'rights' if she threatened the status quo and the male sense of superiority. Oxford's women students were still at risk of losing the rights and privileges they had worked so hard for, including the right to an equal education. It was a powerful reminder that they were far from considered as equal members of the University. In March 1928, male undergraduates at the Oxford Union debating society voted in favour of the motion: ‘That the Women’s Colleges of this University should be levelled to the ground.’
The above text is an extract from my afterword 'Connecting threads: Gertrude Trevelyan and Virginia Woolf' for William's Wife by Gertrude Trevelyan (Boiler House Press, 'Recovered Books' imprint, 2023). It is republished with the kind permission of the editors. See below for link to Part Two.
[i] Marriott, R. A., ‘1927: a British eclipse’, Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 1999, vol.109, no.3, pp.117-143
[ii] Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries (Vintage 2008), abridged and edited by Anne Olivier Bell, with an introduction by Quentin Bell, p.233.
[iii] ‘Timeline: 100 years of women’s history at Oxford’ in Women making history:
https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/oxford-people/women-at-oxford (accessed 24.3.23)
[iv] Woolf was also a respected literary critic and essayist, who began her writing career in 1904 as a book reviewer for the (Anglican weekly) Guardian. See Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society 1890-1914: ‘Mrs L.’s cheque’: https://akennedysmith.com/2016/11/25/kathleen-and-virginia/ (accessed 24.3.23).
[v] Woolf, Selected Diaries, p. 229.
[vi] ‘…the story of the Press is, in a way, the story of the marriage: Leonard’s anxiety for her health, their mutual interests, their areas of division, and reflected in the list, their cultural and political life.’ Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Vintage, 1997), p. 362.
[vii] Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 558.
[viii] Ibid., p. 507.
[ix] In a letter to Lytton Strachey, she described Cambridge as ‘that detestable place’. Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, Letters (Hogarth Press, 1956), 12 June 1912. ); see also Karen V. Kukil, ‘Paper Hearts: The Correspondence of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, 1906-1931’: https://www.smith.edu/woolf/kukil%20article.pdf (accessed 24.3.23)
[x] Lee, p. 213.
[xi] Woolf, ‘Phases of Fiction’ (The Bookman, 1929).
[xii]‘Timeline: 100 years of women’s history at Oxford: 1920’, op. cit.
[xiii] Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (Gollancz, 1935). Quoted in Ann Kennedy Smith, 'Lost in the Archives' (accessed 14.11.23).
[xiv] Quoted in Daisy Dunn, Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars ((W&N, 2022), p. 118.
[xv] Daisy Dunn, Not Far from Brideshead, pp.119-26.
[xvi] G.E. Trevelyan, ‘On Garden Cities’ in Red Rags: Essays of Hate from Oxford (Chapman & Hall, 1933), pp. 133-150, p. 134.
[xvii] Ibid.
[xviii] Brad Bigelow, ‘Hot-house, by G.E. Trevelyan (1933), ‘The Neglected Books Page’ website:
https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=6657
(accessed 24.3.23).
[xix] Gertrude Trevelyan, Julia, Daughter of Claudius (Basil Blackwell, 1927).
[xx] The Spectator, 25 June 1927.
[xxi] ‘Women at Oxford: Strong Protests Against the Statute’, Western Mail, 16 June 1927.
Ann, I think your Substack is one of the best ones out there. It's a chilly, but sunny morning here in Brazil and I'm catching up with your posts and enjoying my coffee. Perfect way to spend a Sunday morning!
This is wonderful! Gertrude Trevelyan is so impressive.