“I read Greek as hard under the trees as some of your Oxonians in the Bodleian—gathered visions from Plato & the dramatists—eat [sic] and drank Greek & made my head ache with it,” recollected Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1984–, 7: 354). In the past, literary historians (Jenkyns 1980; Turner 1981) assumed that classical study in the nineteenth century was almost entirely a masculine activity pursued in Oxford’s Bodleian Library and other institutions, if indeed the gendered nature of classical reception was considered at all.1 In the first half of the nineteenth century, when women were still excluded from higher education and formal training in ancient Greek, knowledge of classical texts was a form of cultural capital that afforded young men of a certain class a place in the establishment, as Christopher Stray’s (1998) extensive research into Victorian schools and universities demonstrates. Yet...
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