Sources on Oxbridge life life during the 60s/70s for a female academic.

[sian_shoe]

The era I am setting my story in is vaguely 70s and vaguely Oxbridge, and my main character is a post PHD researcher stuck in a small museum similar to the Pitt Rivers, doing grunt work and going through that awful “so what now” grey dirge that happens post education in your mid 20s.
There's a discovery of 112 letters set in a psuedo medieval land,

Comments

[louisedennis]

Can't help with most of this but my mother (daughter of a teacher - albeit one who ended up in the Ministry of Education as a schools' inspector) got into Oxford in the 1950s from a small boarding school (this one, I think). It wasn't hippy (obviously) but it wasn't Cheltenham Ladies' College either. She certainly got the impression that it wasn't the school so much as her A level grades which determined her chances of entry, though I'm sure class markers like accent helped a lot in her interview.

At the time Oxford had its own entrance exam, but I think (though I'm not sure) you could apply after your A levels for entry based on those qualifications. My impression is that is what my mother did though I'm a little hazy. If your character was going via the entrance exam route then she would probably have needed to go to a school that would provide coaching for the entrance exam.

[syntinen_laulu]

Re No 4: what exactly do her parents see as the 'best start' in life? if she showed serious intellectual ability, and academic attainment was high on their list of values, St Paul's Girl's School was (and is) probably the most academically eminent of all English girls' schools, sending a couple of dozen girls to Oxbridge every year (and it was a poor year when none of those got scholarships). Music was also high-level, but art was somewhat starved by comparison. It is day only, though.

[sian_shoe]

my problem is also her money bracket of her family would make her distinctly middle class; daughter of an illustrator and children's book publisher would probably not bring in as much money as I assume it would, but I cannot for the life of me change the characters of her parents now. I'm circling the idea of her being a day boarder somewhere quiet in Surrey, like Roedean.

I think I might end up going the route of her studying elsewhere and coming to Oxford for postgrad work, which suits the nature of the letters and how they are discovered. (Seems miscellaneous things like that end up at the Bodleian pretty regularly.)

[marycatelli]

A small independent income could help boost them, if that wouldn't throw things off. (Perhaps it was an unexpected legacy.)

[sian_shoe]

Yoink, stolen. Thank you for the plot wrangling!

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[anonymous]

If there is no reason for her to board, she could have received a good education and got good A levels attending a fee-paying academically orientated girls' high school, perhaps one of the GDST schools or something similar or a grammar school. Academic ability would be the main thing - she'll have to do very well at O levels and A levels. There would also have been an entrance examination which could either be sat "4th term", that is the autumn term before sitting A-levels, or 7th term, ie the autumn term after sitting one's A -levels. If she sat 4th term and got offered a place, her offer might be two "E"s, but it would have to be obvious to the college that the student was more than capable of 3 or 4 A's. (This was a godsend to a friend of mine who was offered a place at an Oxford college and came down with glandular fever the Easter before her A-levels - even half awake she got Cs and Bs in her 4

[nineveh_uk]

I second the academically-oriented fee-paying day school. She'll need good A-levels, but the school may also have University contacts who can support an interview and give her tips.

[sian_shoe]

this is set in the 70s, where the a level/school system was a little bit different. She's post grad, so am going the route of Oxbridge being postdoc, which gives me more wiggle room .

[joyeuce]

I was also going to suggest a grammar school. My mother got into Cambridge from hers in the early 1960s, and in fact she had an offer from Oxford as well. I think people stayed on for a third year of sixth form in order to take the entrance exams in the autumn, though I'm not sure what they did for the rest of the year.