Introduction

I write this sitting in the gardens of Newnham College. Bathed in the buttercup blaze of May, the world in its present form looks especially unrealistic, even by Cambridge standards. In a minute or two I will stand up and I will walk through the white doors of the Sidgwick building (“curved like ships’ windows among generous waves of red brick”, to borrow Virginia Woolf’s description) and through the courtyard past Sylvia Plath’s Stone Boy with Dolphin, to seek the cool of Newnham Library, and a corner to type the last words of my PhD thesis. I have been a graduate student at Newnham for the better part of the last six years. Lately, I have been imagining the day I’ll step into the Porters’ Lodge, or through the Pfeiffer Arch, and I’ll look around, a mere memory; I, of course, will be the memory; I won’t belong here anymore. So I write this personal anthology for myself, for that day: a breadcrumb trail of stories, all somehow linked to this place, to magic myself back to myself: to the time I called Newnham home.