Isobel Hurst examines the role of women writers in the Victorian reception of ancient Greece and Rome, showing that they had a greater imaginative engagement with classical literature than has previously been acknowledged. The restrictions which applied to women's access to classical learning liberated them from the repressive and sometimes alienating effects of a traditional classical education. Women writers' reworkings of classical texts serve a variety of purposes: to validate women's claims to authorship, to demand access to education, to highlight feminist issues through the heroines of ancient tragedy, to repudiate the warrior ethos of ancient epic.

Oxford, the home of lost causes, the epitome of the world of medieval and renaissance learning in Britain, has always fascinated at a variety of levels: social, institutional, cultural. Its rival, Cambridge, was long dominated by mathematics, while Oxford's leading study was Classics. In this pioneering book, 16 leading authorities explore a variety of aspects of Oxford Classics in the last two hundred years: curriculum, teaching and learning, scholarly style, publishing, gender and social exclusion and the impact of German scholarship. Greats (Literae Humaniores) is the most celebrated classical course in the world: here its early days in the mid-19th century and its reform in the late 20th are discussed, in the latter case by those intimately involved with the reforms. An opening chapter sets the scene by comparing Oxford with Cambridge Classics, and several old favourites are revisited, including such familiar Oxford products as Liddell and Scott's "Greek-English Lexicon", the "Oxford Classical Texts", and Zimmern's "Greek Commonwealth". The book as a whole offers a pioneering, wide-ranging survey of Classics in Oxford.

Isobel Hurst examines the role of women writers in the Victorian reception of ancient Greece and Rome, showing that they had a greater imaginative engagement with classical literature than has previously been acknowledged. The restrictions which applied to women's access to classical learning liberated them from the repressive and sometimes alienating effects of a traditional classical education. Women writers' reworkings of classical texts serve a variety of purposes: to validate women's claims to authorship, to demand access to education, to highlight feminist issues through the heroines of ancient tragedy, to repudiate the warrior ethos of ancient epic.