"[1] For his part, Lodge considers that the varsity novel was called as such "[b]efore World War II...[relating] the exploits of young men at Oxbridge, of which Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson was a classic instance, and the first section of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited was perhaps the swan-song.
Furthermore, Forbes considers, that the "[t]he prime example...is Donna Tartt's debut The Secret History (1992), a critical and commercial success that spawned several imitators, the most notable being Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics."
[4] An early representative of the varsity novel is Edward Bradley's The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, while a later example is Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons.
[5] For his part, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, states that by the publication of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim (1954), a campus novel, asserts that "the varsity novel was well established in England, often marked by lushly sentimental reminiscence of gilded undergraduate life, as in Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie or Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.
"[8] A noted female writer was "Alan St. Aubyn, a pseudonym for Mrs. Frances Marshall, [who] wrote women’s “varsity novels”.