A novel featuring adultery between two Oxford dons inevitably invites comparisons, but there is one which horrifies its author, Clare Morgan. “It’s certainly not a sex-on-the-campus novel,” she says, when I mention David Lodge, who made his reputation with stories of copulating academics. “Absolutely not.”

A Book For All and None is Dr Morgan’s ‘literary debut’ – she has written an earlier novel but doesn’t want to discuss it. As director of Oxford University’s creative writing masters degree, she has a reputation as a formidable intellect, and her new book does nothing to overturn this. The story starts with Raymond, a lonely, aging expert on Nietzsche. As is the way in Oxford, he knows Beatrice — a Virginia Woolf expert — by sight and by reputation. The progress of their affair is interwoven with details of Nietzsche’s involvement with Russian émigré Louise von Salome more than a century before.

The novel is ambitious on many levels, tackling the meaning of self, relations between men and women, and the question of why we are here. By the end, anyone with shaky knowledge of Nietzsche and Woolf is left wondering where fact ends and fiction begins. I suspected that Woolf probably didn’t have an illegitimate baby by one of Nietzsche’s descendants, but had to check other things (there’s a useful note at the back).

She said: “It is very much a ‘what if’ novel. There are certain basic facts and then it spins off into fiction.”

One fact that inspired her was Woolf’s visit to Manorbier in Pembrokeshire. “Why did she spend time on her own in this remote place. The fact that she was getting to grips with her first novel at the time suggests that Manorbier was a place where she could breathe and be herself.”

Dr Morgan is convinced that To The Lighthouse was influenced by Manorbier as much as by Cornwall, where Woolf spent her childhood holidays.

Dr Morgan’s own childhood landscape, in the Welsh borders near Monmouth, plays a role in her novel, as the two lovers escape to Raymond’s family home in the hills.

The reasons for Beatrice and Raymond’s choice of research subject become clearer as their personalities and childhood experiences are laid bare. Does the author believe that academics choose certain specialisms because of early experiences?

“I can’t prove my colleagues’ reasons for researching any one area or another but I would say that the passions or obsessions that we have are linked to this. I’m not obsessed by Woolf but I have been passionately interested in her and I’m sure that’s based on early things that happened.”

She came to academia relatively late, having graduated in sociology and social psychology and embarked on a six-year career in the gas, chemical and light engineering industries. She continued her childhood habit of writing stories, and eventually came to Oxford, sandwiching an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia between research degrees. When she started Oxford’s creative writing masters in 2004, opposition had already been defeated. But she admits there were tensions. “I was fortunate in already having colleagues in the English faculty who supported me. I certainly don’t think the battle had been won. It was a challenge to develop something that was appealing to writers at the same time as having the academic rigour Oxford requires.”

Dr Morgan's business experience came in useful when creating the character of Walter Cronk, Beatrice's high-flying husband, head of a conglomerate which becomes embroiled in conflict in the Middle East.

Like Beatrice, Dr Morgan is an expert on Woolf, but why Nietzsche?

She has a long-standing fascination with philosophy — her research degree was on existentialism and literature. “I had been fascinated by him for a long time, from as early as my childhood, with phrases like ‘herd mentality’ filtered down.”

Beatrice and Raymond’s affair starts with long conversations about their intellectual interests and the author is fascinated by “the relationship in the mind and of the mind”. She started the book in 2002, but is sanguine about the lack of time for writing, given her busy day job. As for the conflict between the imagination and the strict sticking-to-the-facts of academia, she feels that the contrast helps. “A different perspective can re-energise. It can be quite valuable to have to put your work down and absolutely concentrate on something else, because when you go back to it you can see what is working and what is not working.”

* A Book For All and None is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £12.99.