Zuleika Dobson

Zuleika Dobson is a highly accomplished and superbly written book whose spirit is farcical, said E. M. Forster. It is a great work–the most consistent achievement of fantasy in our time …
so funny and charming, so iridescent yet so profound.

Originally published in 1911, Max Beerbohm’s sparklingly wicked satire concerns the unlikely events that occur when a femme fatale briefly enters the supremely privileged, all-male domain of Judas Col- lege, Oxford. A conjurer by profession, Zuleika Dobson can only love a man who is impervious to her considerable charms- a circumstance that proves fatal, as any number of love-smitten suitors are driven to suicide by the damsel’s rejection. Laced with memorable one-liners ( Death cancels all engagements, utters the first casualty) and inspired throughout by Beerbohm’s rococo imagination, this lyrical evocation of Edwardian undergraduate life at Oxford has, according to Forster, a beauty unattainable by serious literature.

I read Zuleika Dobson with pleasure, recalled Bertrand Russell. It represents the Oxford that the two World Wars have destroyed with a charm that is not likely to be reproduced anywhere in the world for the next thousand years.