ABSTRACT
When in 1879 the founders of a new college for women at Oxford were looking for a name for their institution, they decided to name it a er Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII and a woman considered by the new hall’s Lady Principal, Miss Elizabeth Wordsworth, to provide a good example to future students: ‘She was a gentlewoman, a scholar, and a saint … What more can be expected of any woman?’1 To the new inhabitants of Lady Margaret Hall, such an example may have been more intimidating than inspiring, but in one respect at least, the life of the average female student did recall that of Lady Margaret, namely in the emphasis placed upon Christianity as an integral part of student life. For the young women of early twentieth century Oxbridge, reconciling the demands of the gentlewoman, the scholar and the saint demanded the negotiation of a gendered religious practice. is chapter highlights the importance of religion in university ction, with a particular focus on the gendered representations of Anglo-Catholic practices at the universities. I rst trace the fallout from the Oxford Movement through ction with a brief glance at Mrs Humphrey Ward’s 1888 bestseller Robert Elsmere, then look at two later Bildungsromane, Gertrude Winifred Taylor’s Th e Pearl from 1917 and Shane Leslie’s 1926 novel Th e Cantab, examining how both novels portray religious questioning. I then move on to examine a much later novel, Mary Wilkes’s 1945 Th e Only Door Out, which features a female student who joins a convent. Ultimately, these texts suggest that religion both functioned as an extension of the university experience from which women were excluded, but at the same time o ered the possibility of a supportive community outside of university life for some women students.
