Zuleika Dobson: Or, An Oxford Love Story

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Nobody could predict the consequences when ravishing Zuleika Dobson arrives at Oxford to visit her grandfather, the college warden. Formerly a governess, she has landed on the occupation of illusionist, and thanks to her overwhelming beauty - and to a lesser extent her professional talents - she takes the town by storm. However the epidemic of heartache that follows and proceeds to overcome the academic town makes for some of the best comic writing in the history of English literature.

Reviews

Praise for Zuleika Dobson and Max Beerbohm

Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes... He is without doubt the prince of his profession.
Virginia Woolf

Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art.
Evelyn Waugh

Zuleika Dobson is a highly accomplished and superbly written book whose spirit is farcical. It is a great workthe most consistent achievement of fantasy in our time... So funny and charming, so iridescent yet so profound.
E. M. Forster

Perfectly delightful... All style and wit, a pretty fantasy served up in exquisite, ornamented prose.
Michiko Kakutani

I read Zuleika Dobson with pleasure. It represents the Oxford that the two World Wars have destroyed with a charm that is not likely to be reproduced anywhere in the world for the next thousand years.
Bertrand Russell

Of comic novels that have quaffed the elixir of classic: Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm.
Cynthia Ozick

Among the masked dandies of Edwardian comedy, Max Beerbohm is the most happily armored by a deep and almost innocent love of himself as a work of art.
V. S. Pritchett

In his best stories there is more than a whisper of magic realisma murmur, however distant, of questions about the nature of reality.
John Mortimer

Elegantly stylized satire.
The New Yorker

Erudite and lively.
The Village Voice

Graceful, witty, and charming.
Sewanee Review

Max Beerbohm, I dare say (and I believe it has been said before), is the most subtly gifted English essayist since Charles Lamb. It is not surprising that he has (now for many years) been referred to as the incomparable Max, for what other contemporary has never once missed fire, never failed to achieve perfection in the field of his choice Whether in caricature, short story, fable, parody, or essay, he has always been consummate in grace, tact, insouciant airy precision.
Christopher Morley

The greatest of English comic artists.
The Times (London)

A perfect fantasy.
The New York Review of Books

There is no doubt about the cool irony of the style, or the fact that its unlike any other book thats ever been written.
The New York Times

If Zuleika Dobson is too frivolous to be certified as canonical, it is clearly a perennially revivable minor classic, uniquely redolent of a particular time and place.
L.A. Times

Author Bio

MAX BEERBOHM was an English essayist, caricature artist, and parodist. He was born in London and went to Oxford University, though after finding renown through his writing he left the university without a degree. Among his best-known works are the short-story collection Seven Men and his many collections of caricatures, which led to his being branded the greatest English comic artist.