![]() The burden of the chapter is to establish an atmosphere of aestheticised decadence, weary yet vulnerable. You’re to come away at once, out of danger. Last night it was pullulating with women. I must say the whole of Oxford has become most peculiar suddenly. We were giving a ball….worst of all, the don who lived above me, a mouse of a man connected with the Natural Sciences, had lent his rooms for a Ladies’ Cloakroom, and a printed notice proclaiming this outrage hung not six inches from my oak… Here discordantly, in Eights Week, came a rabble of womankind, some hundreds strong…Echoes of the intruders penetrated every corner, and in my own College was no echo, but an original fount of the grossest disturbance. The university atmosphere is strongly all male, so much so, that when women are invited to social events during Eights Week, Charles and Sebastian view this as an intrusion: Waugh’s recreation of Oxford in the 1920s is delicate, sparingly precise, and full of longing. ![]()
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