This book came across my radar years ago from the MLA’s Top 100 (English Language) Books. I had never heard of it, thought it sounded interesting, and was intrigued by the title. Years passed and I finally found a copy of it in a Little Free Library.
It’s a farcical love story taking place at Oxford in about 1900. The novel and story being told remind me how weird books written between 1895 and 1915 really are. That weird caught-between space in time prewar and post-Victorian has a kind of listless feel to it. Aside from Mark Twain, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, there’s not a lot of books that stand out and remain with us.
This book involves the alluring but not especially beautiful Zuleika Dobson, niece of an old don, showing up at Oxford, and immediately putting every young man into a tizzy.
This is a fairly common kind of story, and as you might imagine, she immediately draws the attention of The Duke, an immensely rich and vaunted Duke who is willing to throw it all away for her (but in reality it means sharing his enormous wealth with her). All conflict is self-made, and as he is spurned he becomes despondent and decides to kill himself.
It’s important to remember this is a farce, and so the suicidal themes are not “real” suicide, and even though this is most definitely not a progressive novel, it’s really a funny criticism of the kind of toxic Romanticism that young men put themselves through.
(Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Beerbohm)
