Novels about Cambridge
Exploring a university city through its literature
Hello! and welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. This week’s post is a reading list of novels set in Cambridge, and I’m grateful for so many brilliant recommendations from you, dear readers. *I have now expanded this list* based on your helpful emails and Comments - thank you! Read on for my some of my favourite literary publications on this platform, and news of a new Substack directory for the best bookish writing.
Cambridge fiction is flourishing
There’s a lot of them, and many are much-loved classics – twentieth-century novels set in Cambridge, that is. They include: E. M. Forster’s The Longest Journey (1907) and Maurice, posthumously published in 1971; Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922); Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer (1927); C.P. Snow’s The Masters (1951); Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue (1974); Frederic Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes (1976), the seven books (so far) of James Runcie’s murder mystery series ‘Grantchester Mysteries’ from 2012 onwards.
My post today dives into a few other Cambridge novels you might be less familiar with - and why they are worth reading today.
Alternative histories
Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories (2004): The first in her series featuring the detective Jackson Brodie, Atkinson’s novel was praised by Stephen King as ‘not just the best novel I read this year but the best mystery of the decade’. The multi-layered story memorably begins during a hot summer in 1970 in the cluttered Newnham home of Victor, a mathematics lecturer at St John’s College Cambridge, his pregnant (and bored) wife Rosemary and their four young daughters, who are free to explore the meadows around Grantchester. ‘No other child of their acquaintance was enjoying such a hazardous existence that summer.’ Atkinson is superb at evoking character and Case Histories mixes complex family dramas with tragedy, comic twists and occasional, shocking violence. But Atkinson’s sense of place is central to a novel in which she pinpoints the disparate nature of Cambridge depending on social class and circumstance. It’s a pity that the televised version of the Brodie stories relocated the action to Edinburgh.
A. S. Byatt's Still Life (1985): ‘Frederica Potter arrives at Cambridge University greedy for knowledge, sex and love’, and falls in love with ‘a mysterious and controlling poet’, the publisher’s blurb informs us. Byatt is the older sister of the novelist Margaret Drabble, whose novel The Radiant Way (1981) is about three Cambridge women graduates who reunite in later life. Both sisters attended Newnham College, Cambridge in the 1950s (Byatt 1954-57; Drabble 1857-60), and Byatt (then known as “Toni Drabble”) took classes alongside a glamorous American poet called Sylvia Plath, a published poet whose studies were funded by a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship. As Heather Clark writes in Red Comet, Plath and Byatt did not get along while at college together, but it’s strange that the Yorkshire-born Byatt’s antipathy towards Plath continued. “[Sylvia Plath] is a major poet” she told one interviewer in 1991, “don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t know she could write like she could write. She didn’t show any sign of that at Cambridge. She just seemed silly.” 1 (I can’t help wondering if Byatt was rather envious of Plath, and perhaps a little in love with Hughes herself.)
Colleges of the imagination
Lots of people have recommended Engleby (2007) by Sebastian Faulks, whose novels I usually enjoy, but so far I’ve been too squeamish to read this one because of its violent theme. But I can definitely recommend Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels (1990) which is the unlikely love story of Fred Fairly, a junior Fellow at the fictional all-male Cambridge college, and Daisy Saunders, a nurse who has been ejected from a London hospital. Set in Cambridge and London in 1912, it’s both a love story and a novel of ideas, as Fred finds his scholarly convictions shaken up by his encounter with Daisy (apparently Fitzgerald wanted to call her novel ‘Mistakes Made by Scientists’). The opening paragraphs are wonderfully evocative, depicting cyclists battling their way along Mill Road through a gale-force wind which blows down trees and turns the cows on the common upside down: ‘tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason’. There’s a fascinating recent essay on Penelope Fitzgerald as a ‘late-blooming’ novelist by
here.
I haven’t yet had the chance to read The Hesitant Architect (2017) by
but it sounds as if it would make a great tv drama series for the festive season: ‘The return of architects Eleanor Sanders and Peter Hunter, both 1980s Cambridge alumni, to the University town for a charity event - the televised renovation of a college house in the 12 days leading up to Christmas - is marred by tragedy.’
Tall tales of the library
In The Liar (1991)
’s protagonist Adrian Healey attempts to gain access to the Cambridge University Library (UL)’s store of forbidden literature by forging an authorisation note by his college tutor. This comic novel relies on and enhances persistent myths that there’s a secret collection of obscene publications held in the library’s locked tower, so it’s fitting that The Liar featured in a previous exhibition revealing the true story of the Tower Collection. Read more in the UL’s revealing ‘Tall Tales: Secrets of the Tower’ (and I highly recommend Stephen Fry’s very funny Substack publication ‘The Fry Corner’ ).
The Dark Tower by C.S. Lewis was published posthumously in 1977 as an unfinished ‘found’ sequel to Lewis’s science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938). The imaginary tower is said to have been inspired by the very real Tower of Cambridge University Library, which was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott and opened in 1934. The manuscript’s authenticity has been questioned by scholars, however - another Tower-related myth that might have appealed to Stephen Fry’s mendacious alter ego.
P.D. James’s Cambridge
Cambridge has inspired a LOT of crime, in fictional terms at least. Below are just a few of them. But firstly, a tribute to the ‘the first lady of crime’: Phyllis Dorothy James, better known as P.D. James. Many of her novels, including An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), are set in the city to which she moved as a teenager, when her family was going through financial and personal difficulties that were far removed from the privileged life within the colleges. Her father did not believe in higher education for girls, and in any case Phyllis had to leave school at sixteen to take care of her younger siblings, after their mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital.
The current Cambridge University Library exhibition ‘Murder By the Book’ investigates the fascinating background of her early writing, with correspondence connected to publication of her first novel, Cover Her Face by Faber and Faber in 1960. The surname of P.D. James’s most famous fictional detective was taken from the English teacher she admired at Cambridge High School:
A poet whose wife and son died in childbirth, Adam Dalgleish was given the qualities that P.D. James admired most: intelligence, sensitivity and reticence. (CUL, ‘Murder by the Book’, 2024)
More crimes and mysteries
Jim Kelly’s The Great Darkness: A Cambridge Wartime Mystery (2018) is set in 1939 during the opening months of World War Two when nightly blackouts (‘the great darkness’) enveloped the city. It’s the first in Kelly’s ‘Nighthawk’ series, praised as ‘intelligent crime fiction’ by Val McDermid. The Cambridge Murders (1945) by the archeologist Glyn Daniel (first published under the pseudonym Dilwyn Rees) is ‘one of the best whodunnits I have ever read’, one reader tells me; another recommends Every Breath You Take (1994) by Michelle Spring. The best-selling The Wyndham Case (1993) by Jill Paton Walsh is part of her series starring the fictional detective Imogen Quy, who investigates the case of a dead body found in the locked library of ‘St Agatha's College’ on Chesterton Lane. Another novel set in an imaginary all-women’s Cambridge college is A Lesson in Secrecy (2012) by Jacqueline Winspear, set in a fictional version of Girton College in the 1930s.
‘In the summer of 1932, Maisie Dobbs' career takes an exciting turn when she accepts an undercover assignment directed by Scotland Yard's Special Branch and the Secret Service. Posing as a junior lecturer, she is sent to a private college in Cambridge to monitor any activities 'not in the interests of His Majesty's government'’ (from the Cambridgeshire Libraries description of A Lesson in Secrecy).
Pam Smy is the writer and illustrator of Thornhill. A kind reader told me recently that the illustrations of her second novel The Hideaway (2021) are based on drawings she did in the Ascension burial ground (see Anne Thomas’s post below). Smy’s The Hideaway is about a boy who runs away from a difficult situation at home and takes refuge in an overgrown graveyard. While hiding there he meets an elderly man who is tending the graves in preparation for All Soul’s Night, when something magical will happen. Aptly, Frances Cornford’s poem of the same name has been engraved by Eric Marland and set into the church wall there.
Cambridge novels between the wars
The 1920s and 1930s seem to have been a golden age of Cambridge fiction. E.F. Benson’s David of King's (1924) was widely praised when it was published for its handsome and wholesome protagonist: ‘David is so merry, so altogether lovable and healthy’ (Observer). By contrast, Shane Leslie’s The Cantab (1926) caused some controversy, and the first edition was withdrawn following the Church of England’s concern with certain explicit paragraphs. (I’m reliably informed that that King's College archive has an annotated copy, with all the characters identified.) Joseph Gordon MacLeod’s Overture to Cambridge: A Satirical Story (1936) is speculative fiction, based on his 1933 play of the same name, and an antidote to the idea of ‘cosy Cambridge’ fiction.
I’m intrigued by the sound of Sarah Campion’s Cambridge Blue (1937), which I haven’t yet tracked down. Sarah Campion (1906 – 2002) was the pseudonym of Mary Rose Alpers, née Coulton, who was born into an academic Cambridge family and grew up in the village of Shelford. She became a journalist, teacher, radio broadcaster, social activist, and traveller; after living in Australia from 1938-39, she wrote six best-selling novels set in the northern outback, and she is known as an Australian writer.
Cambridge past and present
Rebecca Stott's Ghostwalk (2007) is a widely praised mixture of ghost story, well researched historical fiction and murder mystery. It’s an ‘intellectual thriller, dripping with blood and erudition,’ according to the New York Times. ‘In this mesmerizing first novel, Stott, a historian of science at Anglia Ruskin University in England, has drawn on the traditional resource of historical fiction to fill tantalizing gaps in the archival record.’ Cambridge past and present, and a real historical mystery involving Isaac Newton’s experiments in alchemy, are explored.
Also featuring a historical setting is Nicola Upson’s Nine Lessons (2017). It’s the seventh book in Upson’s much-praised crime fiction series starring the ‘Golden Age’ crime writer Josephine Tey. ‘In the years before the Great War, M.R. James told ghost stories by candlelight to a handful of friends and scholars,’ the publisher’s blurb goes. ‘Now, twenty-five years later, those men are dying, killed off one by one...’ M.R. James was the scholar and Provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1905–1918, and his ghost stories are still widely read and adapted as dramas.
Cycling postscripts
H.G. Wells, The Wheels of Chance (1895) isn’t about Cambridge, but it was recommended by an eagle-eyed reader of ‘Ladies who cycle’ last week for its comic exploration of social issues concerning class, women’s growing independence and the cycling craze of the 1890s in the UK (you can even follow the cycle route that Wells describes, apparently). And I’m grateful to
for sharing her post in which she writes about George Bernard Shaw’s unhappy experiences in 1895, when he was determined to master the art of cycling: ‘after a desperate struggle, renewed on two successive days, I will do twenty yards and a destructive fall against any professional in England. My God, the stiffness, the blisters, the bruises, the pains in every twisted muscle, the crashes against the chalk road that I have endured – and at my age too. But….I will not be beaten by that hellish machine’ ( ‘GBS, Bertha and Nelly’).
Bookish Substacks
I’m planning to add more details about each of these soon, but meanwhile here’s a round-up of twenty literary-minded publications on this platform that I regularly read and recommend:
Auraist’s excellent and comprehensive
, plus ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; and ’s delightful ‘A Reading Life’.Bookish writers are being encouraged to take part in
’s planned BookStack Directory on her publication ‘The Booktender’. ‘Please help me represent you within this directory of Substacks posting regularly about books,’ Abra writes. ‘If you have created at least 8-10 posts so far this year about books other than ones you’ve written yourself, this is probably your party!’ (see survey link here).See Mira Stout’s article, “What Possessed A. S. Byatt?,” New York Times (26 May 1991).
You could add the following Cambridge novels to your list:
Joseph Gordon MacLeod, Overture to Cambridge (1936)
Shane Leslie, The Cantab (1926) {The King's archive has an annotated copy, with all the characters identified)
E.F. Benson, David of King's (1924)
Sarah Campion, Cambridge Blue (1937)
C.P. Snow, The Masters (1951)
Rosamund Lehmann, Dusty Answer (1927)
I was incredibly touched by your heartwarming mention of my novel The Hesitant Architect, dear Ann! Hugely appreciated! I hope you will enjoy it if you should get a chance to read it. The sense of place reflected in your articles was what first attracted me to your posts. Your kindness does all the rest. Keep up the good work!