3. Emerging

Mary entered Oxford as an undergraduate to read Greats in October 1942 in the middle of World War Two and stayed until April 1944. The war-time atmosphere was bleak, and her diary reveals she was often cold and hungry. Her lecturers and tutors are described. Over a period of nine months, she was frequently and regularly sexually harassed by one of her teachers, a man over thirty years older than herself. In marked contrast to her later accounts which make light of the matter, the descriptions in her diary of this experience reveal much guilt and confusion. She found the syllabus very stretching and had time for little else though she formed a close friendship with Elisabeth de Gaulle, the daughter of the French resistance leader, later President of France. She just scraped a first-class result in the Mods part of her degree. In the spring of 1944, as a result of wartime regulations, she had to leave Oxford to work in a ‘reserved’ occupation as a teacher at Sherborne School for Girls. She returned in October 1946 to a greatly changed Oxford and a much fuller life. Her two intimate relationships with male undergraduates before meeting her future husband, Geoffrey Warnock, are described in her diaries. Geoffrey was a moral philosopher, later to be Principal of Hertford College and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. In 1948 she was awarded a first-class degree in Greats. She spent 1948-49 in postgraduate study. In the summer of 1949, she married Geoffrey and was appointed a lecturer, and later a fellow, of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford.