The Professor of Poetry, by Grace McCleen – review

Elizabeth Stone, English professor at UCL,  has long lived on ‘paper and words and thin air’. Single, friendless, dessicated, respected, she passes out during a faculty meeting and wakes to find herself ‘attached by a chain of spit to her own cardigan’. A brain tumour is diagnosed, and removed. Expecting death, Elizabeth receives the news that her treatment was apparently successful as a gift: ‘Time had been returned to her.’ She takes her bravest decision in 30 years and goes back to ‘the city of books’ where, as an undergraduate, she had the only profound emotional experience of her adult life.

When Elizabeth was seven, her unstable mother disappeared, leaving her only child forever feeling ‘halved, like a house fallen into the sea’. Unsympathetically fostered, she sought companionship and refuge in books. From the hour of her admission interview at Oxford (for so it is, though it’s never named), Elizabeth is in thrall to her tutor and mentor, Edward Hunt, an unprofessorial northerner in jeans and bovver boots who loves Bach and Joy Division, and whose room is crammed with books, ‘amorously interleaved, rudely splayed or tightly bound… whispering, confidential… spine to secret spine’.