Author: Joanna Miller
Year published: 2005
Category: Adult fiction (historical)
Pages: 384 pages
Rating: 4 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): UK
Summary: Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its one-thousand-year history, Oxford University officially admits female students. Burning with dreams of equality, four young women move into neighboring rooms in Corridor 8. Beatrice, Dora, Marianne, and Otto—collectively known as The Eights—come from all walks of life, each driven by their own motives, each holding tight to their secrets, and are thrown into an unlikely, unshakable 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. Politically-minded Beatrice, daughter of a famous suffragette, sees Oxford as a chance to make her own way - and some friends her own age. Otto was a nurse during the war but is excited to return to her socialite lifestyle in Oxford where she hopes to find distraction from the memories that haunt her. And finally Marianne, the quiet, clever daughter of a village pastor, who has a shocking secret she must hide from everyone, even her new friends, if she is to succeed.
Among the historic spires, and in the long shadow of the Great War, the four women must navigate and support one another in a turbulent world in which misogyny is rife, influenza is still a threat, and the ghosts of the Great War don’t always remain dead.
Review: Historical fiction is a genre I really enjoy (former history teacher and all that) and this one was good, but not great. The second half was definitely better than the first when I felt like there wasn't enough of a plot. I guess I'd say it had a bit of a slow start, but by the end I felt invested in the four main characters.
The setting and time period of this novel are well done with the reader becoming steeped in Oxford University in the 1920-21, the first year women were admitted and the main characters' first year in college. It is clear that this wasn't an easy entry to university life with the men thwarting them at every turn, chaperones needed for every outing, strict curfews, and a society that was convinced they would never get married or have families since they would be educated. I liked the references to the post WWI world, the suffragists and their work to get women the vote, and the relationships between the four characters.
So, all in all a good book with a slow start.
Challenges for which this counts:
- 20 Books of Summer
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