You may remember a post about Max Beerbohm some eighteen months ago.
I hadn’t thought about him again until now. Mary, heroine of Doctor Thorne says “ … I should not object if I were as ugly as the veiled prophet and they all as beautiful as Zuleika”. Max Beerbohm’s novel, Zuleika Dobson, was published in 1911, fifty-three years after Doctor Thorne , so where does Trollope get the name from? Like Pushkin he read Lord Byron’s poetry, specifically The Bride of Abydos which describes a doomed love affair at the end of which Zuleika dies of sorrow. Eugène Delacroix’s picture depicts her lover, Selim, trying to abduct the only-too-willing Zuleika.
Zuleika means ‘brilliant beauty’ in Persian and her origins go back to the Book of Genesis. Zuleika is the wife of Potiphar and she takes a fancy to her husband’s servant, the handsome Joseph. She does her best to get him to lie with her, as the Bible coyly puts it. Joseph is incorruptible and finally Zuleika has her revenge, telling Potiphar that Joseph had undressed in front of her, mocked her and run away. This was a fib but Potiphar believed her and Joseph was put in prison. The story appears in Genesis, chapter 39, verses 5 – 20. It is vividly depicted in this picture by Spaniard, Antonio María Esquivel y Suárez de Urbina (8 March 1806 – 9 April 1857).
So there is Zuleika the heartbroken lover, Zuleika the shameless hussy and Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika: a femme fatale at Oxford who causes all the undergraduates to kill themselves in unrequited love for her. The book ends with her boarding a train for … Cambridge!