Plenty of things about Tennyson's poemThe Princess make me uncomfortable.1 What makes me most uncomfortable, though, is not the poem itself but literary-critical responses to it. The Princess is a poem about literary and social inheritance as well as relations between the sexes, and one way it combines its interest in each, as I explain in this essay, is through its allusions to bees. Many readings of this poem try to assess its sexual politics without attending closely enough to its interest in literary and social inheritance and, as a result, comments on its sexual politics are compromised and usually include assumptions that are unjustified. The Princess is a very imperfect poem (as readers have not been shy of saying ever since its first publication) but it is also one of Tennyson's most underrated works and deserves more careful attention than it often receives. The poem has a frame narrative with a modern setting – a country estate, in the grounds of which Walter (the son of the house), his sister Lilia, their aunt, some female acquaintance (‘lady friends | From neighbour seats’ (97–8)), and six of Walter's college friends (all male, of course), sit and speculate about women's lack of access to university education. Within this frame narrative, Tennyson embeds a fairy tale: the story of a princess as told by the seven young university men. In that story, Princess Ida, of a Southern kingdom, unwilling to be bound in marriage by a contract made by her father when she was 8 years old, has instead left home and founded a university for women. The Northern Prince to whom she has been promised, wishing to claim his bride, sets out with two friends (Florian and Cyril), disguised as women, to infiltrate the university. The tale is told in the Prince's voice; and there is an unnamed narrator (one of the college friends) in the frame narrative who serves as his opposite number there. When the three men are discovered at the university, war breaks out (between armies led by Ida's brother and the Prince's father); the Princess's side wins, but the women's university, at the close of the tale, has become a hospital for the war-wounded men. From his sickbed, the Prince encourages the Princess to accept his hand (literally and matrimonially), the story ends, and we return to the frame narrative, where the frame characters make some brief responses to the tale before everyone goes home.