Oxford: The Novel.

Bookseller Notes

A novel of College life, following the protagonist from his undergraduate years to his becoming a fellow - a very minor work that gains significant interest from its part in a sophisticated literary hoax woven by historian A.D. Harvey - for whom 'Leo Bellingham' is one among a number of heteronyms. The novel was well reviewed in the TLS, by a reviewer who in a separate article compared its author favourably to Doris Lessing - that author, Stephanie Harvey, being an altogether thinner disguise for the true perpetrator. Harmless enough, and not an uncommon practice in the annals of literature, it was with another embellishment by Stephanie Harvey that the author drew the ire of the establishment that he seemed intent on lampooning - a mention, so casual in nature that the fabrication is at once discreet and outrageous, of a meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky in 1862 became accepted by biographers of the former (first Michael Slater, then Claire Tomalin) before being exposed to the small amount of questioning that would point to its falsity. Investigation into that point exposed the extent and complexity of the bogus community that Harvey had engendered, with this novel - reissued under the name A.D. Harvey in 2012 - an important piece in the puzzle.