My Oxford Year: A Novel

Victorian poetry functions as a recurring motif throughout My Oxford Year, symbolizing the tension between intellect and emotion that defines both Ella’s studies and her relationship with Jamie. Ella arrives at Oxford determined to approach literature with the same analytical skills that have made her successful in politics, but Jamie challenges her to move beyond detached analysis and instead feel what poetry evokes. Their first real connection occurs when Jamie has Ella read Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” aloud, pushing her to admit that the poem makes her feel “lonely” rather than asking her to interpret its meaning. This moment reveals how Victorian poetry becomes a bridge between Ella’s guarded intellectualism and the vulnerability she resists.

Other poems throughout the novel reinforce this dynamic. Ella chooses Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “A Man’s Requirements” for her first essay, a choice that mocks Jamie’s reputation for short-lived affairs but also shows her discomfort in revealing her own emotions through poetry. Later, Jamie turns repeatedly to Tennyson, whose lifelong grief over losing his friend Hallam mirrors Jamie’s own confrontation with mortality. His attachment to Tennyson’s In Memoriam and his “Oxenford” metaphor frames poetry as a language for articulating loss, transition, and death. Finally, Jamie’s private gift to Ella—a journal of poems he wrote about their relationship—cements Victorian poetry as not just an academic subject but as the medium through which intimacy, grief, and love are expressed in the novel.

As a motif, Victorian poetry situates Ella’s Oxford year within a tradition of literature that grapples with love, loss, and mortality. Just as the Victorians sought meaning in an uncertain world, Ella uses poetry to confront her own fears of death and grief, ultimately embracing Jamie and their relationship despite knowing its likely end.