This book explores the representation of the first generations of women who studied at Oxford and Cambridge in popular fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Familiarly termed "Girton Girls", these women were depicted as intent on overthrowing the ancient universities and, by extension, English society. This study argues that the powerful and influential vision of the Oxbridge woman was both exploited and expanded in novels of the time. It shows that this fiction offers not only an informed critical view of this simultaneously anxiety ridden and intermittently hopeful period of English life between 1880 and 1914, but also reveals popular fiction's underexplored contribution to the move towards Modernist themes and literary techniques. The book posits that the Girton Girl was not simply a bit part in the sub-genre of the "university novel" or even within the confines of the New Woman fiction, but rather her character was rich and malleable enough to animate a variety of plots that respond to readers' burgeoning demands for the women who would inhabit their fiction.

Laura Rotunno is an Associate Professor of English at Penn State Altoona, USA. She has taught there since 2003 and received the Pennsylvania State University Teaching Fellow Award in 2014. She serves on the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Executive Board as well as the Advisory Board of the Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education (COVE). In 2013, her Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840-1898: Readdressing Correspondence in Victorian Culture was published in the Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture series. Some of her work has also appeared in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Victorian Review.