Bluestocking Oxford

By Jemima Gravatt From pre-Raphaelite paintings to Fiona Apple’s subway music video and more recently, the Chappell Roan’s 2024 MTV video music award performance, Joan of Arc persists in the cultural zeitgeist as a Romantic figure of female strength. However, today and historically, Joan of Arc also features in conservative areas of France as a […]

By Frankie Jackman In recent years Jilly Cooper’s Rivals has undergone a cultural resurgence, notably following its Disney+ adaptation almost forty years after the novel’s publication in 1988, a surprisingly late arrival given the Rutshire Chronicles’ enduring popularity. What follows reads the novel and its adaptation together, taking the show’s reception as the lens thro...

By Dolla Merrillees Visitors hoping to encounter an exhibition centred on Frida Kahlo’s (1907–1954) paintings and the richly layered inner world that her biographer, Hayden Herrera, described as “full of tangents, ambiguities and contradictions”, may find in Frida: The Making of an Icon a surprisingly superficial account of one of the twentieth century’s ...

By Amina Bold Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) is less a study than a tableau of suspended agency where the governing forces of a woman’s life are conspicuously absent: no family, no real friendships, and, crucially, no love, though there are plenty of lovers. Without these organising principles, what remains is […]