Bluestocking Oxford

Bluestocking Oxford Oxford-based online journal celebrating and investigating the intellectual and artistic achievements of women throughout history.

We are an Oxford-based online journal celebrating and investigating the intellectual and artistic achievements of women throughout history. Get in touch and write for us by contacting [email protected], we'd love to hear from you!

18/09/2026

Our Editor in Chief reads from A Room of One’s Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf

‘Give her a room of her own and 500 a year […] let her speak her mind’

Check out our latest article: 'What Elizabeth Strout Never Says: The Politics of the Personal in The Things We Never Say...
16/09/2026

Check out our latest article: 'What Elizabeth Strout Never Says: The Politics of the Personal in The Things We Never Say' by Eleanor Davies () on our website now!

As the Booker Prize draws closer, this week's Bluestocking article turns to one of the most lauded novels on the longlist: Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say (2026). At face value, Strout's story follows the psychological unravelling of Artie, an American history teacher, acutely aware of loneliness and struggling with crippling social alienation, despite the seeming contentment of his life. But folded into Strout's preoccupation with interiorised suffering is a wider political landscape, one often passed over by her literary commentators. The turbulence of modern-day America casts a shadow over Artie's life: scattered references are made to Gaza, Trump, Chat-GPT, Musk and the pandemic. In her article, Politics Editor Eleanor Davies provides an illuminating view into the novel's covert politics, showing how the self is never separate from the wider world it inhabits and the difficulty of making our deepest feelings intelligible. She writes:

'Strout’s novel takes place in Massachusetts in the run up to the 2024 presidential election, and the political atmosphere of contemporary America is hard to keep at the edges. Ukraine and Gaza enter the conversations of its characters, the pandemic remains a recent memory, and the prospect of another Trump presidency casts its particular shadow over their lives. But this is not, in any conventional sense, a political novel; Strout seems less interested in using fiction to make an argument than asking what happens to an ordinary person when the history around him becomes impossible to ignore.'

Read the full story via link in bio.

13/09/2026

This week’s reading is a stirring meditation on family and love taken from Comme Nous Existons (2021) by Kaoutar Harchi, translated and selected by our Humanities Editor 💙

‘Something […] etched itself into me, hardened, persisted through time’

Check out our latest article: 'The Phantom Pain of Girlhood: Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling' by Emily Sceeny () on...
02/09/2026

Check out our latest article: 'The Phantom Pain of Girlhood: Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling' by Emily Sceeny () on our website now!

Mascha Schilinski's Sound of Falling is a film that is hard to get out of your skin. Its premise is eerily simple: four generations of women inhabit the same farmhouse in north Germany. But it is certainly not a tranquil rural world. Intergenerational traumas reverberate from every room, and the landscape seems unable to forget its past. If Sofia Coppola's films about female adolescence meld melancholia with sundrenched shots, Mascha Schilinski offers an unremittingly dark vision, notable for its blurred imagery, grainy textures and visual tricks. The nature of reality seems harder to pin down for these growing girls - and the film's viewers. In her Bluestocking article, Emily Sceeny offers a route into interpreting the secrets encoded in this bewildering and unforgettable film. She writes:

'Sound of Falling (2025) is director Mascha Schilinski’s second feature film, one I had initially assumed to be a 149-minute historical drama, only to find an impressionistic and singular experimental depiction of girlhood that has continued to haunt me five months after viewing [...] the film portrays how the girls’ experiences echo one another across generations, suggesting that trauma is not an individual experience but a collective one. Each generation inherits the suffering that precedes it, as trauma transcends the physical and temporal to become a residual mark upon the body, mind, and place.'

Read more about the film via link in bio.

02/09/2026

For this week’s summer reading Politics Editor Eleanor Davies ( ) shares a poignant moment from Yael van de Wouden’s novel of emotional reawakening, The Safekeep (2024).

‘She had held a pear in her hand […] and she had eaten its core’

Check out our latest article: 'The Patron of Pink: Madame de Pompadour and the Arts' by Karis Tavernier-Nicholas on our ...
26/08/2026

Check out our latest article: 'The Patron of Pink: Madame de Pompadour and the Arts' by Karis Tavernier-Nicholas on our website now!

'Few human beings since the world began can have owned so many beautiful things,' remarked Nancy Mitford of Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764), mistress to Louis XV, King of France. Known for her impeccable taste in porcelain and fondness for pink (the shade Rose Pompadour was named after her), she was universally admired - and then loathed. Having the king's ear, and with it an unusual level of political influence, soon made her the envy of Versailles. Sexual jokes were made of her last name Poisson, which means fish, and her ascendancy from a humble bourgeois background to a powerful figure in court was mocked. It was through her mastery of culture that she retailiated. Portraits by Boucher were commissioned, framing her as a contemplative scholar and emphasising her virtue through a girly sartorial combination of Rococo froths, frills and bows. Pompadour also turned her hand to support the manufacturing of French porcelain, adorning the rooms she lived in with whimsical Sévres figurines of pink naval ships and scented porcelain flowers. In her article, Karis Tavernier-Nicholas opens Pompadour's box of confections to rediscover the opulent objets d'art she left behind and how they made her a historical power player. She writes:

'Aside from Pompadour’s portraits, which made her the face of the Rococo artistic style, Sèvres porcelain showed her aesthetic tastes extend into objects of everyday luxury. The factory’s celebrated Rose Pompadour glaze immortalised her name in the creation of a new shade of the colour, demonstrating that her patronage shaped not only individual artworks but the visual identity of eighteenth-century France.'

Read more about Pompadour's artistic world via link in bio.

Check out our latest article: 'Find the Beginning: Nolan's Odyssey and Homer's Complicated Women' by Julia Ledesma () on...
19/08/2026

Check out our latest article: 'Find the Beginning: Nolan's Odyssey and Homer's Complicated Women' by Julia Ledesma () on our website now!

Be it island-dwelling seductresses, faithful wives or proto-feminist godesses, Homer's ancient epic, The Odyssey, is awash with mysterious and multifaceted women. Yet in Christopher Nolan's controversial modern cinematic update, not only have some of the women been excised, but they have undergone reduction. Circe has lost her sexuality, Athena is an extension of Odysseus' conscience, and Calypso is silent about the sexual double standards in which gods freely take mortal lovers and object when goddesses try to do the same. The narrative circles resolutely around an idealised, Hollywood version of Homer's hero. After watching The Odyssey from the wine-dark sea of velvet chairs in Paris' Grand Rex cinema, Julia Ledesma now turns her thoughts to the meaning of translation and Nolan's adventurous departures. Engaging in a debate catalysed by classicists like Mary Beard and Emily Wilson, she writes:

'Wilson calls Nolan’s Calypso “an unpaid therapist.” The phrase names the film’s redistribution of agency: Calypso ceases to inhabit an erotic life of her own and becomes an interpreter of Odysseus’s interior life. Narrative agency is not forcefulness but the capacity to desire, judge, and act from purposes not wholly organised around the hero. Calypso can become more decisive and less independent; Circe more forceful and less desiring; Penelope more assertive and less ambivalent. A woman may gain lines and lose narrative authority.'

Continue reading via link in bio.

Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey has defined cinema this summer, sparking debate among film critics, academ...
16/08/2026

Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey has defined cinema this summer, sparking debate among film critics, academics and internet commentators for its stylisation and approach to Homer's source material. Revolving around the hero, Odysseus, are complicated and intricately limned female characters, played in the new version by a host of Hollywood goddesses.

So powerful were Homer's original depictions of figures like Athena and Circe that Samuel Butler, a British writer, argued in 1879 that the bard must have been a woman. Yet classicist Emily Wilson sees no such complexity in Nolan's depiction of women. In her review for the LRB, she contends that the director's 'script allows only for a set of all too brief tableaux of female victims'. But why does Nolan fall so readily into the trap of softening the edges of the poem's spiky and seductive female characters?

Check out our website this Wednesday as Bluestocking contributor Julia Ledesma reflects on what it means to translate an epic to the screen and how Nolan's film redistributes women's agency.

Check out our latest article: 'Evolutionary Psychology meets Feminism: Professor Anne Campbell and a Woman's 'Mind of he...
12/08/2026

Check out our latest article: 'Evolutionary Psychology meets Feminism: Professor Anne Campbell and a Woman's 'Mind of her Own' by Raluca David () on our website now!

Professors with a scintillating lecturing style who lambast longstanding beliefs inevitably inspire the next wave of scholars. Oxford alumna and Durham University professor of psychology, Anne Campbell, was one such exhilarating intellectual. Her early career was marked by risk-taking in the name of research: she spent two years underground in Brooklyn in the 1980s, meeting with members of girl gangs to document their desires and understand their psychology for her stirring monograph, 'The Girls in the Gang' (1984). Challenging traditional narratives around feminine passivity, in these gangs she saw agency and aggression, but which fundamentally differed from that exhibited by men since it was grounded in the defense of personal integrity rather than protection of the 'pack'. She built on her findings in her next book, 'A Mind of Her Own' (2002), bringing evolutionary theory into the conversation. In this week's Bluestocking article, Raluca David reflects on the academic legacy of her former psychology professor and her feminist provocations. She writes:

'Female minds were considered, for a long time, a sort of by-product of evolution, rather than being shaped by their own evolutionary ‘desires’. Anne Campbell changed the conversation. She shed light on how women had evolutionary problems to solve, and had just as much power of decision-making as men did: through competitiveness, through kinship, through social status of their own.'

Read all about it via link in bio.

Check out our latest article: 'Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery' by Dolla Merrillees on our w...
05/08/2026

Check out our latest article: 'Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery' by Dolla Merrillees on our website now!

The image of Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) is instantly recognisible. It continues to adorn magazine covers, illumine frames in art galleries, and inspire artists to translate her breath-stealing beauty into new works. While seemingly spontaneous portraits capture her vivacious gaiety and high spirits, a glance at photographic contact sheets and behind the scenes pictures on movie sets reveals how meticulous Marilyn was about the image she projected to the world. Tennessee Williams once compared the actress to a 'meringue in which a razor blade is hidden', discerning an interior darkness that was mostly concealed behind the flare of the camera flash. With a month left of the National Portrait Gallery's centenary exhibition 'Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait', Dolla Merrillees sought out the woman behind the proliferation of photographic performances and began to question the limits of representation. She writes:

'Rather than revealing the “real” Marilyn, the exhibition invites reflection on the nature of portraiture itself and the ways identities are mediated, constructed and shaped through representation. The more one looks, the more Monroe appears not as a woman gradually revealed but as an archetype, distilled into a handful of familiar poses, pouts and gestures, endlessly performed and reproduced.'

Full story via link in bio.

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