The Eights
The captivating debut historical novel following the first women to study at Oxford University
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- 8,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
They knew they were changing history. They didn't know they would change each other.
Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1,000-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 and find themselves thrust into an unlikely, life-affirming friendship. They have come here from all walks of life, but Dora, Beatrice, Otto and Marianne all long to move on from the Great War, whose ghosts, grief, and secrets still feel very real indeed.
But Oxford is a place caught between tradition and change, where centuries of misogyny and exclusion clash with the promise of new freedoms. And as the group navigate this tumultuous moment in time under the city’s dreaming spires, their friendship will become more important than ever.
‘A beautifully wrought story of women’s rights, freedom, love and experience. I couldn’t put it down’ Harriet Evans, author of The Treasures
‘I became completely involved in the lives of the four pioneering heroines whose friendship is the beating heart of the book’ Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Miller's engrossing debut follows the first women undergraduates eligible to earn degrees at Oxford University. The four students, housed together in Corridor Eight at St. Hugh's College in 1920, take to calling themselves the Eights. They're unlikely allies, a novelistic trope that Miller transcends through insightful and surprising characterizations. Socialite Ottoline "Otto" Wallace-Kerr masks her mathematical gifts under a flapper persona and fights her mother's insistence that she marry. In contrast to Otto's self-possession, six-foot-tall Beatrice Sparks feels insecure about her height and her attraction to women, and she struggles to find herself in the shadow of her famous suffragette mother. Marianne Grey, a scholarship student whose funding is contingent on maintaining excellent grades, makes frequent visits to her widowed father at the expense of her studies. Lastly, there's Dora Greenwood, whose brother and fiancé were both killed in WWI. The women bond as they struggle with their demanding coursework and the school's pervasive misogyny, which Marianne compares to mice under floorboards, "scuttling about unseen but never far away." Their mutual trust is tested after secrets are revealed, first about Dora's fiancé and then about the real reason for Marianne's trips home. Miller supplements her nuanced group portrait with bracing depictions of lingering WWI trauma. It's a memorable tale of a fast-changing world.
