man of great power and force ... possessed of a thorough knowledge of the world, with immense kindness of heart". Noel Annan, in a 1983 pen-picture, describes Browning as "preposterous" and "a cracking snob" but recognises Browning's pioneer work in the field of teacher training: "He saw that what the desperately poor young men who came to learn to teach in the State schools needed more than anything was encouragement. Shoals of letters from them and their parents showed what he meant to them". In her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, the writer Virginia Woolf depicted Browning as a misogynist, a personification of the patriarchal system which restricted women's educational opportunities. Invoking a passage from Wortham's biography, Woolf wrote: "Mr Oscar Browning was wont to declare that ... irrespective of the marks that he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man". The feminist scholar Jane Marcus, writing in 1985, characterised Browning as "the great misogynist of his age, the heroic figure of the man with his finger in the dike against the rising tide of female education...[He] held the unofficial Chair of Applied Misogyny at Cambridge for many years". Hirsch and Peters, however, record that whatever his expressed prejudices, Browning took practical steps to support and develop educational opportunities for women and aid their educational advancement. A letter to Browning from Sidgwick suggests that Browning supported the then highly unfashionable idea that full Cambridge degrees should be awarded to women, a proposal that was not enacted until 1948. Furthermore, when the Political Society debated a motion in support of women's suffrage, Browning voted in favour. In his professional life Browning maintained discretion and decorum; according to Davenport-Hinds: "His eccentricities enabled his protégés to share emotional intimacy without impermissible sexual contact". Beyond his Cambridge life, Browning acquired a set of rooms in St James's Street, London, a base from which he entertained a variety of mainly working-class boys and men, over many years: "Any youth whom OB liked", says Anstruther, "to whom he thought he could do a kindness, perhaps in exchange for a little amusement, arrived, stayed and went away". Browning treated these acquaintances well, with generous gifts and hospitality, but as with the favourites from his Eton schoolmastering days, they were liable to be dropped without ceremony when Browning tired of them. Although Browning was recognised as a gifted teacher, he