In the Library
Zuleika Dobson
Max Beerbohm, 1911
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 6 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 25
- Length
- Length 81k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
Death cancels all engagements.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
The day Zuleika Dobson steps off the train at Oxford, the stone busts of the Roman emperors outside the Sheldonian break out in a sweat. They know what is coming. She is a travelling conjuror with a handful of clumsy tricks and a face that empties every lecture room in the university, and she can love only a man who does not love her, a thing no man alive has managed. The Duke of Dorset, the most magnificent undergraduate in England, holds out for a single afternoon. By the end of Eights Week the young men of Oxford have gone into the Isis for her in their hundreds, with the crowds watching from the barges. Beerbohm wrote one novel, and it is a mock-epic so exquisitely mannered that every absurdity arrives dressed in Homeric grandeur, gods and omens and all. Read it for sentences that are the funniest in the language, then feel the grief underneath them: a man drowning the whole golden Edwardian afternoon he loved, and knowing it.