trying it. Midgley took the Oxford entrance exam in the autumn of 1937, gaining a place at Somerville College. During the year before starting university, it was arranged that she would live in Austria for three months to learn German, but she had to leave after a month because of the worsening political situation. At Somerville she studied Mods and Greats alongside Iris Murdoch, graduating with first-class honours degree. Several of her lasting friendships that began at Oxford were with scientists, and she credited them with having educated her in a number of scientific disciplines. After a split in the Labour club at Oxford over the Soviet Union's actions, she was on the committee of the newly formed Democratic Socialist Club alongside Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins. During Midgley's time at Oxford, many of the young male undergraduates left to fight in the Second World War. This left the women undergraduates in an unlikely positions: for the first time they made up the majority in the student body. Recalling this time, Midgley writes "I think myself that this experience has something to do with the fact that Elizabeth [Anscombe] and I and Iris [Murdoch] and Philippa Foot and Mary Warnock have all made our names in philosophy... I do think that in normal times a lot of good female thinking is wasted because it simply doesn't get heard." Interest in the philosophy of the women philosophers at this time sparked the interest of two philosophers at Durham University, who began a project called In Parenthesis which explores the connections between four women philosophers (Foot, Anscombe, Midgley and Murdoch). Career Midgley writes that career in philosophy may have been affected by women having a greater voice in discussion at the time, because many male undergraduates left after a year to fight in the war. Midgley left Oxford in 1942 and went into the civil service, as "the war put graduate work right out of the question". Instead, she "spent the rest of the war doing various kinds of work that were held to be of national importance". During this time she was also a teacher at Downe School and Bedford School. She returned to Oxford in 1947 to do graduate work with Gilbert Murray. She began research on Plotinus's view of the soul, which she has described as "so unfashionable and so vast that I never finished my thesis". In retrospect