Oxford is a walled city still, and within her black and golden, crumbling, scabrous, aged, dignified, and eternal walls lie pockets of rarefied air, places where, turning a corner or entering a conversation, the breath catches and for an instant one is taken up into . . . if not the higher levels of heaven, at least into a place divine. And then, in the next moment, there comes an eddy of grit, and the ghostly echo of mediaeval oxcarts is heard rumbling down past Christopher Wren’s bell tower on their way from Robert D’Oilley’s castle to his grand bridge over the river.
The High Street, seen from St Mary’s tower
Up the High towards the tantalising curve, but before entering it, at the very foot of St Mary’s wise divinity, I made an abrupt turn north, and there, oddly satisfying in its scorn for a deliberate and formal perfection, was the quadrangle with the round earthiness of the Radcliffe Camera in its centre, bounded on its four sides by the tracery of All Souls on my right, the height of St Mary’s at my back, Brasenose College on the left giving nothing away, and before me, where there should rightly have been trumpets and gilt, the unadorned backside of the Bodleian and the Divinity School. I was home.
—Laurie R. King, A Letter of Mary
The Radcliffe Camera
I am loving every bit of Laurie R. King’s series following the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell, including the convoluted plots, the witty banter, the delightful cast of minor characters and the historical details. But Mary’s love for Oxford, which matches my own, positively thrills me to my toes.
So, I’m currently reading a book on the London Fire of 1666. The author is a Christoper Wren scholar (which you can definitely tell from his many, many mentions of the man even before the fire starts). In one passage, the author was explaining how Wren was certainly a novice architect before the fire, with only a few buildings, including Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre, to his name. And I immediately thought, “Ah, the Sheldonian. I’ve sung Christmas carols in there with all of the Oxford students.” Wren changed the face of London after the fire. And he certainly left his mark on Oxford as well. I love hearing his name mentioned.
Oh, Katie, I love this.
I would love to see the places she talks about in that series too!
[...] A Letter of Mary, Laurie R. King Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell team up again, trying to find out who killed a friend of theirs, just after she left an old and possibly valuable piece of papyrus in their keeping. The writing and plotting in this series are brilliant, and this book explores the potential for flare-ups in the church over newly discovered documents. (More relevant than King could have known, writing in the mid-90s.) It also includes a gorgeous paean to Oxford. [...]
[...] of England runs deep in the soul of the series, but Mary particularly adores Oxford, as do I. She never tires of it, and I never tire of her descriptions of the city. (I also love that the American editions retain [...]