Oscar Browning - Cultural Influence

Cultural Influence

These days most people know Browning as the arch villain of Virginia Woolf's feminist manifesto A Room of One's Own. Quoting H. E. Wortham, Woolf condemns Browning as one who "was wont to declare 'that the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man.'" After painting an unsavory picture of Browning's sexual proclivity for young men, Woolf ends by theorizing that "because Mr. Oscar Browning was a great figure in Cambridge at one time," his negative opinion of the intelligence of women would have rubbed off on the fathers of the day and his words would have been cited by them to dissuade their daughters from pursuing higher education.

Although Wortham was Browning's nephew and first biographer, there are problems with his scholarship. Wortham had access to Browning's private papers but included scant footnotes in his 1927 biography of his uncle. Indeed Wortham fails to provide any source, context, or citation for the infamous quote on the inferiority of the intelligence of women. Furthermore, Wortham's sources are impossible to reconstruct because as Dr. Rosalind Moad, archivist at King's College, Cambridge, has pointed out the papers taken by Wortham to produce this biography "disappeared" after Wortham published the work. Included among the missing papers are almost all of Browning's diaries and much of his correspondence. However enough Browning papers survive in the archive at Eton and other places so that Dr. Mark McBeth, an expert on the educational innovations of Browning, can state that "archival materials debunk the feminist myth that Browning disparaged women's educational benefits as well as being antagonistic to women's political issues."