The real senior wrangler this year is a lady, Miss
Philippa Fawcett, the daughter of the late Postmaster-General, who was himself seventh wrangler thirty-four years ago, in 1856, two years before the accident that robbed him of his sight. And she has not only won the blue-ribbon of the University against all her male competitors, but she has done so, if the report of a Mena in the Pall Mall is to be trusted, without over-work, without over-excitement, and without studying either very late or very early. Miss Clough, the principal of Newnham, is said to have improved the occasion by saying at the,dinner on Saturday evening --".I am sure it is a great lesson to you—to go to bed early." Miss Fawcett is said to have gone to bed regularly at eleven and risen at eight, and to have written all her papers with the greatest circumspection and precision,—slowly rather than fast. The most gratifying thing to us in her friend's account of her is the fact that on the morning of the day when the result of the examination was to be proclaimed, "she did indeed wake early with excitement and confessed to reading Mansfield Park' in bed in order to occupy and calm her mind." So Miss Fawcett is an Austenite, which shows that she has a fine sense of humour. Moreover, the selection the lady made for the purpose of "calming her mind" was a judicious one, "Mansfield Park" being certainly the heaviest of Miss Austen's novels, bright and humorous as it is.
Previous page
