My Fantasy Girlfriend - Zuleika Dobson

As an old 'Oxford man', I found that Max Beerbohm's celebrated femme fatale in the eponymous 1911 satirical novel - the irresistible but not-so-innocently destructive siren who could drive all mankind to despair and suicide - necessarily became an early archetype for me of the unattainable beauty. I think I first read the book at the age of about 12, and it probably had a damaging effect in shaping my expectations of what undergraduate life, and my first experience of romantic love, might be like. We had a Zuleika figure in my year at Corpus, and she took a mischievous delight in breaking my heart and the hearts of several of my friends when we were Freshmen; at least having a confraternity of victims able to console each other eventually helped us to get over our moping, and prevented any of us from succumbing to the fleeting impulse to chuck ourselves in the river to end our misery.

I don't think I'd ever seen John Singer Sargent's Impressionist evocation (above) of the Edwardian belle before, but I rather like it. I also turned up some of Beerbohm's own sketches (though there's no indication as to whether they are supposed to be of Zuleika) which suggest a rather more Pre-Raphaelite vision. *

My favourite, though, is this illustration from The Folio Society's edition of the book.

*  The Beerbohm sketches come from the dangerously addictive 'commonplace book' blog of Canadian Mark Woods - well worth a look (but make sure you haven't got anything else important to do for the next two or three hours).