Being hailed as the brainiest woman on British television has its down sides, Gail Trimble revealed today, after steering her team to victory in last night's final of BBC2's University Challenge.

The 26-year-old Latin scholar said that she had had to develop a thick skin to cope with the sneering comments about her appearance posted on blogs, and the less than flattering invitation to pose for a "tasteful" photoshoot for a lads' magazine.

"Would you believe it, my brother received a Facebook message from Nuts yesterday morning saying ’can we have your sister’s e-mail address, we want her to do a tasteful shoot’," Miss Trimble told BBC Breakfast.

“So of course he sent them an answer saying, ’seriously mate, would you give your sister’s contact details to Nuts?”’

Miss Trimble scored two thirds of Corpus Christi College Oxford's 1,200 points in the quiz's four qualifying rounds, before presiding over its 275 points to 190 triumph against Manchester University in the grand final.

Even the normally sneering quiz host, Jeremy Paxman, professed himself stunned at her vast knowledge, likening it to an “intellectual blitzkrieg". Miss Trimble was presented with the winners’ trophy by the poet Wendy Cope.

Some reaction has been less pleasant, with hostile comments posted on blogs early on in the series. She has been ridiculed on social networking sites for being too intellectual, and one newspaper this week asked: “Why do so many hate this girl simply for being clever?”

Miss Trimble - bespectacled, with long brown hair and a beaming, dimpled smile - said she had been taken aback by the hostility, after experiencing no such problems at school or university.

“Suddenly there’s this thing that involves being in the public eye, and I find all this reaction to me, and I’m sure this wouldn’t be the case if I wasn’t a woman.

“It is nice when people are saying nice things about my appearance, and not nasty things, but it’s sad that they feel it necessary to say things about my appearance at all.”

Asked what she would do next, she said she was working on her D. Phil with a view to becoming an academic. “I’m coming towards the end of it, finishing within the next year, then an academic job, hopefully, that’s what I want to do.”

It did not appear that she would be taking up any offers of photoshoots.

Tiny Corpus, one of the smallest Oxford colleges with fewer than 400 students, also won University Challenge in 2005.

Its passage through the qualifying rounds this time included a 350 point to 15 victory over Exeter University in the quarter-finals, the lowest score since 1972. The drubbing caused Paxman to remark that it was more of a “cull” than a general knowledge show.

The team also brushed aside Durham and Edinburgh Universities, and St John's College Cambridge.

Last night's was a typically barnstorming performance from the team captain, who has a tendency to laugh excitedly when she knows the answer. She seemed nervous at the start as Manchester moved into the lead, but as the pressure mounted she got into her stride.

“The realm that according to Aristophanes was built by the birds to separate...” Paxman asked, getting only that far before Miss Trimble buzzed to interrupt and correctly answer “Cloud Cuckoo Land”, to impressed gasps from the audience.

“Which letter of the alphabet occurs most frequently in the line ’To be or not to be, that is the question?’” she was asked, buzzing immediately with the correct answer: ’T’.

After identifying Dante in a painting, she went on to answer a string of equally challenging questions, identifying shapes created by the position of elements on the periodic table, without seeing the table.

Her team seemed at times as stunned by her brilliance as the television audience.

In previous rounds she has supplied instantaneous answers to questions on opera, art, history, mathematics, chemistry and physics, subject areas that lie well outside her Classics background.

She seemed to have been thrown a googly on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning when she was asked whether she was clever enough to solve the financial crisis. But Miss Trimble adroitly deflected the question, saying with a laugh that she just happened to have a good mind for remembering lots of obscure facts.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010