Studying English literature at the University of Oxford as an Irish undergraduate was an education in being an outsider. I felt alienated from the very start.

On my second evening, the college organised a “formal dinner” for us, the new undergraduates, to meet our tutors. We all had to wear “white-tie” and “sub fusc” while we were wined and dined at a three-course meal in the dining hall alongside our tutors.

Many of my peers were from British private schools, so were already comfortable in this world. One of them even corrected my American professor’s table manners, scoffing at her for not using her cutlery in the right order. I identified with the professor, who had also just arrived to the university, feeling reassured that at least others were also unfamiliar with these codes.

I was less reassured, however, when a professor sat down next to me. Since coming to Oxford as an undergraduate, he had never left, and was now in his 70s.

An Irishman at Oxford: It was an education in being an outsider. I felt alienated from the very start

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He asked me the dreaded question: “What did you enjoy reading this summer?”

I tentatively threw out an answer: Moby-Dick.

He seemed pleased: “Ah yes, the second best novel in the English language ...”

I threw the question back at him as though it was too hot to hold.

He replied that every summer break, he would lock himself at home and read 100 books. By his complexion, I knew he was telling the truth. He continued that, this summer, he had, on a whim, decided to read Sally Rooney’s novels to see what all the hype was about. Not only did he think her novels were overrated, he told me they should not have been published.

[ A Derry Girl in Oxford: ‘The Troubles followed us over the Irish Sea’Opens in new window ]

It was then I realised: I was no longer in the land of normal people.

One surreal evening in my second year, I was forced by circumstance to attend an event in a dingy, darkened room at the back of a local Conservative club. A crowd of Oxford students in fancy dress took turns getting up on stage and drunkenly shouting out speeches.

I had the misfortune of attending on Guy Fawkes night. A Northern Irish unionist took the stage to pontificate on the differences between a papist and a Catholic, and which one deserved to be burned, to raucous applause. I was deeply uncomfortable, scanning the room to see if anyone else felt like me, but everyone simply laughed.

It was not only the people I met that left me feeling alienated, but also the rhetoric of the books I read. Since Oxford unsurprisingly taught literature in an extremely traditional way, we almost never read anything written after 1830. By reading so historically, all I had to do was brush off the dust from some of the books, and a load of anti-Irish rhetoric would come flying off with it.

We were taught, for instance, about Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590), a canonical epic poem that is more than 36,000 lines long and that Spenser described as “cloudily enwrapped in Allegorical devices”. I did not know what to make of it, but initially enjoyed how quirky it was. So, I decided to dig further. It did not take long before I realised many of his allegories were distinctively anti-Irish. In fact, I found that Spenser had written an entire tract called A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), dedicated to advocating for the genocide of the Irish.

I did not enjoy how quirky he was after that.

Unfortunately, Spenser was more the rule than the exception. Class after class, I would sit through texts that either bashed the Irish or Catholics, with classmates awkwardly staring at me as the words were read aloud. The other foreigners in my classes – Russians, Indians, Chinese – were never targeted in the same way.

But that’s the bad and the ugly. Let me tell you about the good.

Though English literature once belittled the Irish, Irish writers stood tall within it – and that was a source of connection that other foreigners did not have.

Seamus Heaney, for instance, was everywhere – from his poetry to his translation of Beowulf in my Old English studies to his criticism of John Clare in my Romantics module. His presence was all the more comforting since he was a writer my mother, a secondary-school English teacher, had taught me about, even dragging me to one of his last public recitals when I was a child.

Oscar Wilde had, of course, attended Oxford himself, and lived on in the curriculum, building names and university legend. He was another writer that I had a personal connection to, as my grandmother, who never finished secondary school, had loved quoting Wilde’s witticisms to me growing up. I took great pride in being able to send my grandmother a postcard of him.

These were just two of many Irish writers whose contributions to the English-language literary canon could not be denied and with whom I enjoyed a kind of quiet solidarity.

• Hugo Harvey is from Cork. He started at Oxford University in October 2021 and graduated in June 2024 – studying for a bachelor’s degree in English literature and language. He is now an aspiring presenter and interviewer, having interviewed Noam Chomsky and Maverick Sabre, and he is also working as a musician, having released his debut single, Step Up, under the artist name Kogan in October 2024
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