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Thomas Huxley, who brilliantly defended Darwin’s ideas of evolution. There were architects like Christopher Wren, who designed the Sheldonian Theatre and, later, artists like William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, whose stained glass windows lit up Christ Church Cathedral; poets like Matthew Arnold, who immortalized the school’s spires; philosophers like John Ruskin, whose books could be found on the shelves of the Radcliffe reading room. From the rule of the Plantagenets until the reign of Queen Victoria, the brightest young men, but only men, had entered Oxford; in exchange for the freedom to think, they cloistered themselves in austere surroundings, clothed themselves in simple robes, and undertook a life of celibacy. But the tone of Oxford changed in 1874, when male students were allowed to marry. And it changed even more dramatically in 1879, when Miss Elizabeth Wordsworth, grandniece of the poet, became the first principal of Lady Margaret Hall, for young women. Only a few years later, in 1886, LMH would serve as home for Gertrude.
    As principal of the women’s school, Miss Wordsworth felt her first priority was to see that her students married. She was convinced that God intended woman to be “Adam’s helpmate,” and to fill that role properly, she insisted, a young woman must develop the “minor graces” of “neat handwriting,” “skillful needlework,” and “the ways of opening and shutting doors.” Her girls were allowed to sit in on lectures and to have their own tutors, but the pursuit of intellectual ideas was still considered questionable, not just for women but for the country. As the contemporary philosopher Herbert Spencer put it, thinking was dangerous for females; “the overtaxing of their brains,” he declared, would lead to “the deficiency of reproductive power.” When Gertrude arrived, the halls of New College Chapel still reverberated with the recent sermon of Dean John Burgon: “Inferior to us God made you, and inferior to the end of time you will remain.” But Gertrude Bell hardly felt inferior: at eighteen, she was already sure that she was the equal of any male, and if anyone doubted her word, she had her father to back her up.

    O xford! , she exclaimed at the top of her first letter home, in May 1886, and she reveled in being one of only a handful of girls in the company of hundreds of men. Round-faced and chubby, exuberant and ebullient, she arrived “half child, half woman,” her new friend Janet Hogarth said, “rather untidy, with vivid auburn hair, greenish eyes, a brilliant complexion, and a curiously long and pointed nose.” Notably she added, Gertrude had “a most engaging way of saying, ‘Well you know, my father says so and so’ as a final opinion on every question under discussion.”
    On the first day of class, Gertrude walked hurriedly with Mary Talbot, a colleague in the History program, and their requisite but doting escort, Miss Wordsworth. Dressed in their long, loose black gowns and black laced boots, square black caps firmly planted on their heads, the young women chatted in nervous anticipation, stepping briskly across the old stone walks. Like Alices in Wonderland, they had to “fly” from the farthest outposts of Oxford, where they lived at LMH, through the grassy University Parks, to arrive in time for their History lecture in Balliol.
    Climbing the stairs, they reached the alabaster hall and saw before them, perpendicular to the lecturer’s platform, rows of long, green baize tables and, seated at them, some two hundred men. No space was reserved for the two young women, however, and no one showed any inclination to make some room. Instead, they were led to the platform, where the professor presided. Sliding into their seats, the women listened intently while the tall, gaunt Mr. Lodge lectured on English History. “We felt it was a great event!” Gertrude wrote to her parents. Not even the thrill of her first class, however, nor the lecture