Celestria Parfitt

Impediment to scholarship

YOU MIGHT NOT THINK that here in the third decade of the twenty-first century there was anyone left in the world like Celestria Parfitt, but nevertheless there she is: an austere, unmarried, elderly woman, daughter of a long-dead baronet, with a hard grey eye and a hairstyle like a 1920s dowager, who for the last 30 years has overseen the archive of one of the smaller Oxford colleges. It was a very long time ago that Celestria — “Miss Parfitt” to her colleagues — first put her aquiline nose into the front quadrangle of St Bede’s. Mrs Thatcher was in her first term then, Lord Fawning, the current warden, the most juvenile of junior research fellows, and Celestria’s monthly salary was remitted to her in the form of a Coutts…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, July 2023

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