accommodation Oxford  

DECLAIMING OXFORD
Oxford, very aware of itself as Oxford, can seldom be accused oTseffing itself short. The fifteenth century panegyrist who boasted that 'If God himself on earth abode would make, He Oxford sure would for his dwelling take' has remained anonymous to history. But, writing in 1932, Oxford historian Sir John Marriott could blithely assert that 'Few cities in the world, none in England, have been so written about as Oxford.' He remembered himself a page later to qualify his claim in a grudging aside  'London, of course, always excepted.' Marriott did, however, have a point.

In 1989 Judy Batson's Oxford in Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography was able to list 533 novels written about or set in Oxford, over four times as many as have a Cambridge background.
Apart from being the setting for much writing, Oxford has also been the chosen residence of many writers. While her husband was commandant of Cowley Barracks, Bury Knowle House at Headington was once the home of now forgotten Adeline Kingscote (1860-1908), an accomplished swindler who bankrupted herself and the vicar of Cowley and wrote over sixty tides, ranging from The English baby in India and how to rear it to romances, up to eight a year, with such highly appropriate tides as What a woman will do,

The indiscretion of Gladys and The love letters of a faithless wife. Joyce Cary, Elizabeth Bowen, Ian McEwan and Brian Aldiss, sometime bookseller and literary editor of the Oxford Mail are all Oxford residents. Oxford novelist alumni include Winifred Holtby, Rose Macaulay, Mary Renault, Brigid Brophy, Margaret Forster, Barbara Pym, Joanna Trollope, supreme mistress of die 'Aga Saga' and Helen Fielding, author of Bridget Jones's Diary. 'Dr. Seuss' (Theodor Seuss Geisel) author of The Cat in the Hat was a graduate student in die 1920s when the Rev.W.W. Awdrey, creator of Thomas the Tank Engine, was an undergraduate. Kenneth Grahame was educated in Oxford and wrote The Wind in the Willows for the beloved son, later an undergraduate at Christ Church, who shares his tomb in the graveyard at St Cross. In 2002 local resident Philip Pullman became the first ever children's author to be awarded the prestigious Whitbread Prize.
In literary terms Oxford seems to have a close affinity with crime. Afficionados disagree about whether Sherlock Holmes went to Cambridge or Oxford. Dorothy Sayers' creation, the insouciant Lord Peter Wimsey, was indubitably an Oxford man.The success of the television versions of the curmudgeonly Inspector Morse (from Latin mors, death) has made Oxford and crime synonymous to many and even inspired Morse walking tours around the city.

His creator, local resident Colin Dexter, was awarded an OBE and die freedom of the city. A Cambridge man and former examiner in Classics for Oxford's schools examination board, Dexter stands in an august tradition. Writing detective stories has long been considered a respectable diversion for the overburdened donnish mind, affording opportunities to indulge in elegant puzzle-setting, stylish word-play and displays of esoteric knowledge, invariably antiquarian or literary, rather than scientific. Dons were essentially inhabitants of a closed world of insider jokes and feuds which closely paralleled the classic country house setting of the traditional detective story in which a brilliant amateur upstages the bumbling police. The otherwise austere Monsignor Ronald Knox and socialist historian G.D.H. Cole and the worldy J.C. Masterman were all accomplished exponents of die genre.

Some dons, however, took refuge behind pseudonyms — J.I.M. Stewart wrote prolifically as Michael Innes.

Modern practitioners include John Fuller, Peter Levi and Veronica Stallwood, a former Bodleian employee, whose Kate Ivory stories are invariably set in Oxford. Other recent examples include Michael Dibdin's Dirty Tricks, Tony Strong's The Poison Tree and the best-selling An Instance of the Fingerpost, set in the 1660s by art historian Iain Pears, an Oxford graduate and another local resident.