I was looking for something else entirely in the basement of Oxford’s Campion Hall when I came upon a little Elizabeth Bowen collection. Opening each volume I noted that they had come from the library of Dorothy Bednarowska (1915-2003), a founding fellow along with Iris Murdoch and others, of St Anne’s College in Oxford. A little online digging and I learned from a Telegraph obituary that Dorothy, who had been ‘an ardent Evangelical as an undergraduate’, later became a Roman Catholic, presumably developing a relationship with the Jesuits who at the time ran the local Catholic parish as well as Campion Hall.
Perhaps more interesting in this context is not how the books ended up at Campion but that Dorothy Bednarowska was a renowned teacher of English, establishing with two other tutors at St Anne’s a reputation for teaching ‘many of today’s best-known women writers, journalists and academics, inspiring them with her own love of learning and abiding relish for textual detail.’
Rather wonderfully, Dorothy’s love of teaching meant that she published nothing, dedicating her life to her students as ‘a type of professional academic not uncommon in her day but hard to imagine now.’
Having read the obituaries I returned to the basement and the little collection of Bowen volumes. Might there be any indication that these had been the reading material for teaching about Elizabeth Bowen’s writings? Some of the volumes are pristine but most have lots of light pencil-marks, some underlining, and a very occasional word. For example, ‘atmosphere’ at the top of page 27 of The Death of the Heart.
It pleases me to imagine these books being used by one of the great teachers of English literature to enthuse undergraduates about Elizabeth Bowen’s work. And perhaps we can allow ourselves to imagine a meeting of Elizabeth Bowen and Dorothy Bednarowska, perhaps during Bowen’s second period of residency in Headington between 1960 and 1965?
Dorothy Bednarowska – St Anne’s College, Oxford
Elizabeth Bowen and Headington
Colin Brady 