Item 66: Zuleika (1912)

Only after resigning from The Saturday Review as theater critic, marrying, and retreating from social life in London to Rapallo, Italy, did Beerbohm finally complete his sole novel, Zuleika Dobson, or, An Oxford Love Story (1911). It is a comic fantasy about a young woman whose arrival at Oxford University inspires the all-male undergraduate population to commit mass suicide out of despair at not possessing her. Her talents—she does magic tricks—are unexceptional, and her beauty, too, is unremarkable, as is clear from Beerbohm’s later drawing of her feline face and elongated figure. What she has is an undefinable magnetism or star quality, and what the men experience is a mass obsession akin to mania. This was Beerbohm’s most outrageous satirical commentary on celebrity culture and its self-deluded followers.