The Eights
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4.3 • 32 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
They knew they were changing history.
They didn’t know they would change each other.
Following the unlikely friendship of four women in the first female class at Oxford, their unshakeable bond in the face of male contempt, and their coming of age in a world forever changed by World War I.
“Entertaining and moving…I came to love these four women as though they were my sisters.”—TRACY CHEVALIER, #1 New York Times bestselling author
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.
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.
