📖 Book Review ~ The Eights by Joanna Miller

Penguin
April 2025

My thanks to the publisher for my review copy of this book

They knew they were changing history. They didn’t know they would change each other. 

Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students. Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight. They have come here from all walks of life, and they are thrown into an unlikely, life-affirming friendship.

Dora was never meant to go to university, but, after losing both her brother and her fiancé on the battlefield, has arrived in their place. Beatrice, politically-minded daughter of a famous suffragette, sees Oxford as a chance to make her own way – and her own friends – for the first time. Socialite Otto fills her room with extravagant luxuries but fears they won’t be enough to distract her from her memories of the war years. And quiet, clever, Marianne, the daughter of a village vicar, arrives bearing a secret she must hide from everyone – even The Eights – if she is to succeed.

But Oxford’s dreaming spires cast a dark shadow: in 1920, misogyny is still rife, influenza is still a threat, and the ghosts of the Great War are still very real indeed. And as the group navigate this tumultuous moment in time, their friendship will become more important than ever.

📖 My Review..

It’s 1920 and after years of suffrage women finally get the vote whilst at the same time a group of stoical young women are able to matriculate, for the first time, at Oxford University, starting an adventure which will see them ridiculed, and ignored, not just by some of their male counterparts but also by the dons who are there to instruct them in their chosen subjects. On Corridor Eight four brave young women meet and become firm friends. Their social backgrounds couldn’t be more different and yet through shared fun and difficult adversity they find a common bond, supporting each other when life throws them unexpected curve balls.

Carefully weaving fact and fiction, this lovely story takes us right into the heart of this great institution, however, as the women discover to their cost the hallowed halls are filled with misogyny, distrust and downright bigotry and yet they cling to the belief that education will give them opportunities never before seen. However, the country is still reeling, and grieving, from the effects of the Great War, and some young men returning to Oxford to complete their education still carry the scars of the horrors they witnessed in the trenches of northern France.

Beautifully written, filled with wonderful characters who guide you by the hand throughout, and who stay with you long after their individual stories are finished. The Eights was a real pleasure to read from start to finish, I shall miss Beatrice, Otto, Dora and Marianne and wish them well on their onward journeys.

About the Author

Joanna was born and raised in Cambridge, UK. She studied English at Oxford and later returned to the University to train as a teacher. After ten years in education, she set up an award-winning poetry gift business. During this time, she wrote thousands of poems to order and her rhyming verse was filmed by the BBC. Unable to resist the lure of the classroom, Joanna recently returned to Oxford University to study creative writing. She will be a writer in residence at Gladstone's Library in 2025.

When Joanna isn’t writing she is either walking her dog, providing a taxi service for her teenagers, or working in the local bookshop. She lives with her family near the Grand Union Canal in Hertfordshire, UK. The Eights is her first novel.

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