Gail Trimble, who led her team to victory on University Challenge last week, has crowned a perfect month by getting engaged.

This is a timely riposte to critics who tried to pour scorn on her as smug, arrogant and aloof. One on the internet even stooped so low as to call her a “horse-toothed snob”.

With her Rapunzel-like hair and glasses, the classics student from Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, led her team from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to a 275-190 point victory over Manchester University in Monday night’s final. A record 5.3m viewers watched the show.

In previous rounds she had scored two thirds of her team’s 1,200 points in what a rival contestant called an “intellectual blitzkrieg”.

Some viewers took exception to her habit of saying “well done” and “quite” to her teammates when they answered correctly.

Cello-playing Trimble, 26, said last week that she had been “irked” by the savagery of the criticism. “Some of the comments were not that nice.” Some suggested she was living proof of the Dorothy Parker aphorism that “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses”. However, Trimble was already secretly engaged to Tom West, 27, a trainee solicitor, who has been her boyfriend for five years, when the prerecorded final was broadcast.

West, a rector’s son, proposed to her on a Valentine’s break in Paris at a romantic spot - the wooden Pont des Arts near Notre Dame.

The Rev Tim West, Tom’s father, said: “We are absolutely delighted for them. I won’t be marrying them and I am delighted at that too. It means I can be father to the groom and husband to my wife and father to my three other sons.

“Gail and Tom are very private personalities and they wanted to keep this as their own private story.”

This weekend Joan Bakewell, the writer and broadcaster, rallied to her support.

She said: “I don't suppose she was seriously distressed by the criticism. I thought she was great and I was cheering her on. I think people who don't know as much feel irritated.

“Intelligent women don’t suffer. They have got too much brains to do that. They will think themselves out of the issue. The people who despise them aren’t worth knowing.”

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