The Eights
The captivating debut historical novel following the first women to study at Oxford University
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- ¥1,600
発行者による作品情報
LONGLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS ASSOCIATION DEBUT CROWN AWARD
‘Entertaining and moving…I came to love these four women as though they were my sisters’ TRACY CHEVALIER
‘I ADORED it. What a fantastic read. My book of the year’ JILL MANSELL
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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.
The Eights is a captivating debut novel about sisterhood, self-determination, courage, and what it means to come of age in a world that is forever changed.
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'Beautifully captures the power of friendship ... A pleasure to read' PIP WILLIAMS, author of A Dictionary of Lost Words
'I so enjoyed The Eights' 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.
