‘The Eights’ by Joanna Miller

Of late I have noted that several people who I respect have been waxing lyrical about this recent novel, including a great friend of impeccable literary taste who told me that she did not want it to end when she was reading it. When someone says that I tend to head straight for a book, particularly when I need something really engaging to read alongside a more challenging enterprise (which this August has been ‘A Place of Greater Safety’). ‘The Eights’ has provided the perfect antidote.

This novel was published in 2025 and is set in Oxford in the early 1920s. There are four principal characters, all young women studying at St Hugh’s College and commencing their studies in the first year in which women were permitted to matriculate as full members of Oxford university on equal terms with the men. The setting is thus the immediate aftermath of the First World War and many of the male undergraduates are veterans who have suffered physical as well as mental injuries.

Each of our four protagonists has an interesting back story that gradually gets uncovered, including some pretty breathtaking secrets, and each in her own way is presented with challenges (academic and personal) to overcome or come to terms with. The story is very skilfully told and there was never any moment when I did not want to keep turning the a pages.

I think though that what makes this book so outstanding – and powerful and moving too – is the central bond of friendship that develops between Beatrice, Otto, Marianne and Dora. They are thrust together simply by dint of being allocated rooms on the same corridor on arrival at St Hughs (corridor 8 – hence the title), and they hit it off immediately. They always support one another. The narrative is not sustained in any way by conflict between them, and that is both unusual and welcome.

There are villains of a sort outside their circle, but the motives are always explained fully. Writing a novel which is simultaneously highly engaging and populated by decent folk is difficult to pull off, but Joanna Miller does so with aplomb, while also very effectively illuminating the experience of being a young woman in Oxford in the 1920s:

The Isis and student publications like it lambast Oxford’s women for being prudish old maids one week and frivolous husband-hunters the next. Women are mocked for being too dowdy or too attractive, too feeble-minded or too diligent. They are criticized for breaking rules, for slavishly adhering to rules, for using the university’s resources lavishly, for operating on a shoestring. For encouraging the ‘wrong sort’ to apply to Oxford, and for driving the ‘right sort’ to Cambridge.

At the heart of the novel is one very cool lady – Otto (full name Ottoline Wallace-Kerr) – who is exceptionally good fun. She is a former WW1 nurse, a chain-smoking, tiny redhead, who is effectively the leader of the little band of ‘Eights’. She is a posh, slightly cynical mathematician, who loves to party but who never gets too emotional, keeps everything under control at all times and sorts everyone else out when they get into difficulty. A wonderfully drawn character.

I also liked the way real historical figures feature alongside invented characters and enjoyed the weaving in of each character’s story with all the developments of the era – women’s suffrage, Spanish flu, the danger of unwanted pregnancie, expectations of domesticity, as well as the aftermath of war leaving a dearth of eligible bachelors.

This would make one fantastic TV series if done properly, and the best thing of all is that, at the end, plenty of narrative strands are left to be resolved. This book only covers the first of three academic years. It will be hard to match, but could this be the first of a trilogy? I do hope so.