The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson or An Oxford Love Story

Watercolor by Max Beerbohm,
Two Lines of Orphans: Can You Pick Out Zuleika?

By Max Beerbohm, illustrated by the author, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 350

Max Beerbohm was a caricaturist, prose writer, and man about town in Edwardian London. After the text's initial publication in 1911, Beerbohm added over eighty watercolor illustrations to a special copy that Yale University Press reproduces here for the first time. The writing and the illustrations are charmingly fey and graceful.  Zuleika Dobson is an upper-class fairy tale: our heroine is an irresistibly beautiful femme-fatal who sweeps into Oxford and by the force of her charm sets off a wave of mass suicides among undergraduates.  The tone is sparkling, light, and I am reminded of novels by Anita Loos and P.G. Wodehouse. Aldous Huxley claimed that Zuleika Dobson portrays an Oxford culture that was swept away by the two World Wars.

For me, this novel is about the dangers of rereading.  I first encountered Zuleika about three years ago and  was enchanted.  Reading the book was like falling headlong into a world of aristocratic aesthetes.  I loved the fanciful elements in the story: sculptures weep, pearl studs change color as the characters fall in love or grieve, Greek gods laugh at the folly of romance, and ghosts roam freely throughout Oxford.  One of the pleasures of reading is how a book can change my mood.  The act of reading itself is one of pleasurable absorption.  This time around, the novel felt like a Twilight of the Elites tale.  Who cares what a bunch of over-privileged toffs get up to?