From April 18 to May 17, 2024, I will be posting from the City of Dreaming Spires, Oxford, UK.

Friends have asked my husband and me, why Oxford? Why a whole month in one smallish English city when we would have the whole of Britain and even Europe on our doorstep?

For one thing, we’ve done the whole if-it’s-Tuesday-it-must-be-Belgium sort of traveling before, and it’s a young person’s game. At this point in our lives, we decided it was better to go to one fascinating place and stay as long as we could afford. Dig deep rather than skim the surface.

I first got the idea for our “Oxford sabbatical”, as my husband calls it, back in 2016, when three of my kids and I (including Sydney Wren) spent two glorious but exhausting weeks in southern England. For me, it was primarily a research jaunt for my WIP, with 2-3 days each in London, Stratford, Oxford, Glastonbury, and Cornwall (Tintagel and Marazion, specifically). That it wouldn’t be nearly enough time to do any location justice I knew well enough before we set out, but I wasn’t prepared for the subsequent exhaustion, not to mention the frustration at having to leave a place just as I began to feel comfortable getting around in it.

Nor did I foresee how quickly and deeply I would form an attachment to one place in particular: the medieval university city of Oxford.

In a word, I fell in love with the city, and resolved on the spot that my next trip, God willing, would be a longer—much longer—stay in a place which, for me personally, was not only the most beautiful (and walkable) city I’d ever visited, but also haunted with great personal significance.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

To be sure, this thousand-year-old city is simply gorgeous, especially if you, like me, love English Gothic and Gothic Revival architecture. Not for nothing have the few square miles of the city’s center (or should I write, “centre”) been chosen as cinematic backdrop for innumerable films and TV series, some of them personal favorites, such as the long-running Morse / Lewis / Endeavour mystery trilogy, based on the novels by Colin Dexter.

Several Oxford locations famously served as stand-ins for Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies (more of all these later). As I write this, our family just finished savoring the masterful 1981 TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the first part of which was set (and filmed) in Oxford. It was terrific fun, after all our reading and preparation for the trip, for my husband and I, as we watched, to exclaim to one another things like, “Oh, look, Ryder’s rooms are at Hertford College, just across the street from the Bod…and of course Sebastian is at Christ Church! A Marchmain would be, wouldn’t he?”

All that’s great fun, and we have marked down many such locations to include in our itinerary.

But the deeper truth is that by some weird synchronicity of fate or chance or providence (depending on your metaphysics), many if not most of the key figures in the development of my own literary, artistic, and spiritual sensibilities have profound Oxford connections.

Just for starters:

THE INKLINGS

Oxford is the academic and intellectual home of the Inklings, that ad hoc literary gabfest of writers, readers, and academics, led by C.S. Lewis and his brother, Warnie, that met weekly in Oxford’s Eagle and Child pub (and other places), and which included my literary hero J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as Owen Barfield and Charles Williams, among others.

Then there’s…

T.E. LAWRENCE

Lawrence of Arabia was the subject of one of my teenaged obsessions, as well as of my #1 favorite film. Lawrence not only grew up in Oxford and attended the local high school, but was also an undergraduate at Jesus College, then, after WWI, a Fellow at All Souls. (in a weird coincidence, the brother of the film’s brilliant director was the original founder of The Inklings at Oxford!)

THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

Two of my artistic heroes, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones met when they were undergrads at Exeter College, where they read John Ruskin and joined the so-called Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, examples of whose work can be found all over Oxford. Morris was, of course, also a seminal social thinker and, as a writer of fantasy/mythopoeic literature, a huge influence on Tolkien.

ST. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

St. John Henry Newman, another of my teenaged obsessions, was an undergrad at Trinity College, a Fellow at Oriel, a leader of the “Oxford Movement” (a.k.a. “Tractarians”) in the Anglican Church, and eventually a priest, founder of the Birmingham Oratory (which played a major role in Tolkien’s young life), cardinal, and saint in the Catholic Church. The possessor of an absolutely original “imperial intellect”, as one biographer called it, he was also one of the great stylists in the English language. I stumbled on his autobiographical Apologia pro Vita Sua when I was a young teen, and it completely upended my way of looking at things, and eventually my religion.

So, as you can see, in many ways this month in Oxford will be a pilgrimage as well as a holiday and sabbatical. It is a chance for me, now that I’m closer to the end of my life than the beginning of it, to pay my respects to some “greats” (in the very beautiful place that nurtured them), who have enriched my life and taught me the meaning of Awe.

If you’d like to follow us on our little pilgrimage, hit the “Subscribe” button on the right.