Her Oxford

8. The New Woman

112 8 The New Woman L ooking at Oxford in the nineteenth century from the vantage    point of the twenty-first, it would be easy to characterize the university as an old-fashioned and hidebound institution that refused to grant degrees to women at a time when other British universities were turning out graduates of both sexes. Yet Oxford had undergone significant reforms during the nineteenth century that revitalized and modernized the university (see Chapter 2). In this respect, Oxford resembled the nation at large—dynamic change on the one hand and slow adaptation, especially in regard to women, on the other. A Dynamic Era By 1890, Victoria had reigned for fifty-three years—a period of dramatic economic, political, social, and intellectual upheaval. Indeed, England had been so transformed since Victoria was crowned in 1837 that it seemed as if hundreds of years had been shoehorned into a single lifetime. Britain was the first country to become industrialized, exploiting steam power to lead the world in manufacturing, mining, and shipping. Technological advances made factories more productive, communication speedier and more accessible, printing presses more efficient, and even childbirth more comfortable (Queen Victoria was administered “that blessed chloroform” during the birth of her eighth child in 1853).1 The first railway line was opened in 1830, covering less than forty miles between Liverpool and Manchester. By 1900, more than twenty thousand miles of train tracks crisscrossed the country, producing “profound changes . . . in the pace as well as the place of living.”2 England was no longer an agrarian society. For the first time in history, revealed as early as the 1851 census, more people lived in towns than in the country. London had once been the only sizable city in Britain, but other towns, mostly in Scotland and the North, saw their populations swell to over 100,000. The Reform Bill of 1832 extended voting privileges to many men of the rising middle class and abolished an outdated electoral system. By 1870, civil servants were chosen by open competition, not patronage, which The New Woman 113 helped insure that the machinery of government would run smoothly, regardless of which party was in power. The middle classes, newly enfranchised in 1832, capitalized on the economic boom and grew to be a powerful force in British society, virtually running industrial England. They were largely Noncomformists (outside the Church of England) and Evangelicals (within the Church of England), and the values of their faith— hard work, thrift, enthusiasm for reform, veneration of family life, and moral respectability—became the dominant ones of the age. The working classes, crowding into cities and often laboring under intolerable conditions , excited the concern of many Victorian humanitarians, including the novelist Charles Dickens. A number of reforms were enacted that eased workers’ lives and improved their standard of living. Many working-class men won the right to vote after the Second Reform Bill of 1867, and they found new political clout with the rise of trade unions. Writers and intellectuals were prominent in this changing, dynamic society . Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith are some of the impressive names that crop up on any list of Victorian novelists, and poets were well represented by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Intellectual giants such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, John Ruskin, Thomas Huxley, and John Henry Newman provoked and stimulated the reading public with their books and essays. Scientific discoveries , particularly those of Darwin (the Origin of Species was published in 1859), altered the way people thought about humanity’s place in the history of the earth, eroding religious certainty. John Ruskin once exclaimed: “If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the chink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.”3 Women’s names also crop up when one looks at the sweep of Victorian literature. The works of novelists Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George­ Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell and poets Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning have all stood the test of time. Barrett Browning wrote Aurora Leigh in 1857, an immensely popular verse novel of eleven thousand lines that dealt with an issue considered daring for the time: the dilemma of the woman artist who has to choose between her vocation and marriage. Virginia Woolf later wrote that “Aurora Leigh, with her passionate...