Though not a Northern woman, or only, at best, by adoption. In Amanda Craig’s The Golden Rule, the Cornish heroine, Hannah, goes to university in Durham:
“Most of all, she liked living in the Castle, a place that not even communal living could strip of romance. Every student wanted to live in the Castle, in the heart of the medieval city, and everyone applied for it, but she had been one of the lucky ones. ‘You know bits of it were in the Harry Potter films?’ said her new friend Nazneen. ‘How cool is that?’ . . . . Of course, Castle students were different from the rest. Its fantasy of high ceilings and arched windows, thick granite walls and ornamental plaster gave them the feeling of belonging to an elite body. Even in her fondest fantasies, she had never imagined living in such grandeur.”
It’s not the most detailed setting I’ve ever seen, but since I got to stay at the Castle when I was at a conference a few years ago, I do know exactly what Hannah means about the grandeur. The Castle is only semi-medieval, having been extensively rebuilt in the 19th century (neo-Gothic splendo[u]r), but I can well imagine that getting to live there for a year would change a person, or make her feel that she could be someone else, “different from the rest.” It would certainly build sturdy legs: lots of stairs in the residential tower, no lift.
Dame Eleanor Hull 