London Calling

When I started at Oberlin in 1980, I already knew I would major in English; books were foundation blocks in my life. I chose Oberlin in part because it had a strong, respected English department.

What I didn’t know until I overheard students talking about it was that Oberlin offered students the chance to study in London for a semester. Every fall, an English professor would take a group of mainly English majors to London to immerse themselves in British literature, theater, and culture. The London Semester—celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and now officially known as the Danenberg Oberlin-in-London Program—was the crown jewel of Oberlin’s English department.

I had been abroad only once, to France when I was 10. Though some of my favorite books as a child were set in England (Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series), and I watched Upstairs Downstairs religiously on PBS, I was not really an Anglophile. But by the middle of my sophomore year at Oberlin, I knew I wanted to go to London. The opportunity to study in a foreign country where the books I loved had been made was overwhelmingly appealing, as was the chance to escape Ohio cornfields for a semester.

In fall 1982, 18 of us landed in London, along with Professor David Walker and a former student as assistant. We met four mornings a week in the parlor of a vicarage in west London. I’m not sure why we ended up there; presumably, it was cheap—so cheap that there weren’t enough chairs, so some of us sat on the floor. We took two courses—British Modernism and London Theater—plus a third independent project.

There is something delicious about reading novels and poetry in situ, as it were—novels by Conrad, Woolf, Forster, Waugh, Greene, Bowen; poetry by Hopkins and Hardy—most written while the writers lived in the UK and all set in England. I read and looked around and thought, “Yes, England is different from what I have known.” I’m sure if I had read those works back in the U.S., they would have resonated differently—and not so strongly.

Once back in Ohio, I read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway for a class and recognized what she was describing because I had walked those streets myself, interacted with English people, and begun to sense the mindset from which such novels emerged. The Great Gatsby was published the same year as Dalloway—1925—and I had a visceral understanding of how different the two novels were because I had lived in the two nations.

Even more impactful were our twice-weekly visits to the theater. Oh, the theater! At the beginning of each week, we were given envelopes containing our weekly stipend and our theater tickets of productions carefully chosen by David. We would read the play and discuss it in the morning, see the production that night, and discuss that the next morning. It was an immersive lesson in analyzing the power of theater, of working out how to take words from the page and put flesh on them, making them three- dimensional, and when it works and when it doesn’t.

We saw almost all of that fall’s repertoire of the two stalwarts of British theater, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as West End productions and fringe theater. We saw Patrick Stewart play Henry IV; he subsequently went global as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. We even met actors: Derek Jacobi, after he starred in The Tempest and Much Ado About Nothing, talked about dealing with stage fright. We were regaled by Judi Dench in her dressing gown after seeing her in The Importance of Being Earnest. David also took us to the opera—the first time I had been—and to the ballet, exposing us to worlds many of us had never considered visiting.

Before the London Semester, I had been to the theater maybe six times in my life. Since then, it has become a habit, and I go at least once or twice a month. Because of the London Semester, I know better why a production is or isn’t working. I can say more than, “I liked it,” or, “I didn’t like it”: I can articulate why because of all those stimulating, challenging discussions we had on the vicarage floor.

The intellectual and emotional intensity of the London Semester made the group of students coalesce in a way that didn’t quite happen with classes on the Oberlin campus. In London, we lived together; we saw one another almost every day; and we discussed and argued and laughed and partied and traveled together. This was aided by David Walker’s great care and attention to both choosing what we did and how we treated one another. The group knew we were lucky to have such an astute professor guiding us.

We grew so close that back in Oberlin we even put on a play together—the Restoration comedy The Man of Mode—because we wanted to sustain the magic of London. Even 40 years on, many of us have retained a bond of some sort to the group, a residual fondness because we shared a memorable, life-changing experience—much like a family. A few have remained close friends. Just in the last nine months, I’ve seen David and seven of the other London students in various places including London.

Yes, London. Because I live there. For me personally, my life really did change because of the London Semester. I fell in love with that vibrant, seductive city, and after graduating from Oberlin, I went back with two friends from the group. My intention was to stay for six months, but 40 years later, I still live there. My husband is British, and our son has dual nationality. It would never have occurred to me to live in London if I hadn’t gone there as an Oberlin student.More than that: I have unintentionally lived my adult life as an “other,” a stranger in a strange land. I’m also an author, and I think that’s no coincidence. There’s something about standing on the sidelines of a culture, analyzing it rather than taking an active part in it, that suits me, the distance making it easier to write. Maybe if I had stayed in the U.S., I would still have been a writer—but not the same one. Being American in London has challenged me in the best way, just as it did back in 1982. When David Walker retired in May 2020, the London group wasn’t able to go in person to celebrate because of pandemic restrictions, but we did put together a slideshow video and testimonials and held a joyful Zoom call. In many of the testimonials, group members cite the London Semester as life-changing. As one participant put it: “I can draw a direct line between those four months and who I am today. … More than anything, London made me brave.” Another wrote: “London is in my basement, in the fabric of my life, in my heart.” For me, the London Semester was the most magical, intense period of intellectual and cultural stimulation I’ve ever experienced. I grew up that semester, as I suspect many have over the past 50 years of the program’s life. I am very glad Oberlin students still have that opportunity today.