The Last Samurai (thoughts on Rereading The Last Samurai) (2)

 The origins of the book will take me some time to think through. Meanwhile, Oxford arcana.

RTLS says 'Sibylla lies her way into Oxford and briefly studies classics there before discovering fewer rational beings there than she expected among her fellow scholars (23). She quits Oxford and starts working for an academic press in London.'

I'm a bit taken aback by 'briefly'.  By the time Sibylla leaves Oxford she is on a Senior Scholarship, which means she is doing graduate work. (There are only a handful of Senior Scholarships, given to exceptionally promising early-stage graduate students.)  She decided to apply to Oxford after (apparently) impressive SATs were not enough to compensate for other shortcomings on her CV when applying to American colleges - so she must have lied her way into the undergraduate classics course at Oxford, which takes 4 years, and must have done very well on the course to win a Senior Scholarship to do research.

Getting onto the BA course with her background is itself admittedly implausible (it used to be, at least, that Oxford would not accept American applicants straight out of high school for undergraduate study)*, but there's nothing in the text to suggest she spent any time at an American college; we must simply imagine some spectacular fabrication.  

Looking at the text again I do see that it leaps from Sib's applications to American colleges to dogged decipherment of German scholarship, but the decipherment takes place 6 years after disenchantment with American college applications and brilliant idea that Oxford might be different.  I expect I thought the undergraduate degree preceding research was self-evident and did not need to be spelled out.

Sib's job: The text says Sib got a job with a firm that published dictionaries and non-academic works of scholarship. I'm not sure I would describe this as an academic press. (Maybe that's wrong? But I don't think an academic press would publish Val Peters.)

*I had gone to Smith for 2 years (3 semesters + 1-year leave of absence + 1 semester) when I applied to Oxford and took the entrance exam, and none of this counted toward the undergraduate course, which I had to start from scratch. This would have been a more plausible kind of background for Sib, but also messy and boring and a drag on the pace of the narrative.