Zuleika Dobson

Zuleika Dobson is a novel by Max Beerbohm, first published in 1911.

Set in an idealized Oxford, it follows a mesmerizing visitor whose arrival turns the university upside down. Admirers multiply, etiquette unravels, and the campus becomes a theater of collective infatuation and self-display, where sophistication masks an impulse toward absurd extremes.

Amid flirtations and challenges, the story skewers romantic grandstanding and the brittle codes of elite society. Devotion is measured in gestures rather than substance, exposing vanity, herd feeling, and the danger of sentiment unmoored from sense.

Written with glittering irony and caricatural grace, the novel remains a pointed comedy of manners and a cautionary fable about the spectacle of desire.

"That old bell, presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures in tweed or flannel, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed idly up the line. Young and careless, in the glow of the afternoon sunshine, they struck a sharp note of incongruity with the worn boards they stood on, with the fading signals and grey eternal walls of that antique station, which, familiar to them and insignificant, does yet whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age."