Wear academic gowns when going to lectures and tutorials. Leave must be obtained from her principal before accepting invitations for the evening, or for mixed parties. A female student may not go out after dinner without permission and must always be back by 11pm and must report her return. She may not attend public dances.
A woman undergraduate may not go for walks, bicycle rides or motor rides alone with a man undergraduate other than her brother. Permission for mixed parties may be given at the discretion of the principal.
And so it goes on.
We’re talking Oxford 1920, and for the first time in its 1,000-year history, female students are permitted to study and obtain degrees at one of the world’s most famous universities. Previously, females were permitted to attend, from 1879, but did not receive degrees. Other universities in Britain conferred degrees on women, but Oxford and Cambridge were the holdouts at that time. (Cambridge admitted women from 1869, but degrees weren’t conferred there till 1948.)
The Eights, a debut novel by Joanna Miller, focuses on four young women who have come to study at the university. The name comes from the fact they share neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight of St Hugh’s College.
We are introduced to them in the opening chapters, with each chapter preceded by some of the university’s rules, the oaths they have to take before being permitted to use the library, letters the women write to family or friends, and snippets from newspaper articles. These ephemera add a further layer of understanding of what life must have been like for these new students.
The characters, of course, are mostly fictional. The actual principal of St Hugh’s at the time, Miss Eleanor Frances Jourdain is part of the text, as well as some other real-life people, such as the suffragette Emily Davison.
The first introduction is to Beatrice Sparks, who is the actual daughter of a suffragette. But her mother derides her for being too tall and has been more absent than present through Beatrice’s childhood, campaigning for the vote and throwing all her energy into activism. It is just two years since women over 30 got the vote, so some of that battle has been won.
Marianne Gray is not wholly convinced that she should be there. A daughter of a vicar, she has been used to taking care of her father, as her mother died giving birth to her. She’s also hiding a secret, which will thread through the narrative.
There’s also Dora Greenwood, taking the place at university that should have gone to her older brother, George, who was killed in World War 1. As if that wasn’t enough hardship, her beau Charles was also killed in the war. He had asked her to marry him. Dora is carrying the double burden of grief and guilt.
And then there’s sassy aristocrat Ottoline Wallace-Kerr, who goes by the moniker Otto, has an easy facility with mathematics and is the oldest at 24. She smokes cigarettes, is worldly wise and knows Oxford from when she served as a driver there during the war.
These four women will become firm friends, despite their differing backgrounds and help each other navigate outdated attitudes and life at university, loaning each other typewriters, rather than having to use scratchy fountain pens. The story moves between past and present; alternating chapters of the present day at Oxford contrast with the lives that the women experienced before attending the university.
Bonding on the day of their matriculation (an enrolment ceremony), they encounter the sexism of some of Oxford’s mocking male students. Change doesn’t come easy and in many big and small ways they are pioneers, but pioneers who must obey the restrictive and sometimes ridiculous rules set by Miss Jourdain. Their principal knows how hard-won this victory is, and sets store by these rules, not wanting to upset the proverbial apple cart in any way.
And the battle is often an uphill one. Challenges range from the mocking male students, to some of the male dons, one of whom wears a black armband to mourn the day women were accepted. They are made to feel the weight of the burden of making history. Here is an apt description of what they have to put up with: “The first lecture of the year, an introduction to the Bodleian Library, takes place in the dining hall at Exeter College. ‘Women enter here,’ says the porter, directing them through the farthest of two oak doors and indicating that they should sit together at one of the long narrow tables.”
The war “to end all wars” and the effects of it remain a presence in these women’s lives as well as of the men who are studying at Oxford now: “Otto can identify the recently demobilised by the deep lines on their faces. The younger ones, probably fresh from Eton, Charterhouse, or Rugby, will have little understanding of the nightmares that plague their older colleagues.” Later on, one of their tutors tells Dora that she sees a “generation that is guilt-ridden and damaged”, and Dora ponders that they are all “blighted. But in this brave new world, she has come to learn, guilt is as prevalent, invasive, and necessary as the air.”
Despite all the draconian rules, the women do manage to meet men, and some of the men are welcoming of their sex in the university. They meet them at genteel teas and outings with chaperones, for instance, who must be paid for, another inequity: the men don’t require chaperones.
I gobbled this book up. I found the details of life at Oxford in 1920 endlessly fascinating — and the novel is packed with necessary research that blends seamlessly into the narrative. The four women, each so different, are all interesting characters who live vividly on the page, and I couldn’t wait to see what happened next to all of them. Miller’s ear for dialogue and 1920s slang is well honed.
This is a compulsive, extraordinary read, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see these characters in a TV series one day. I also wouldn’t be surprised if we hear more of them. The book ends at the conclusion of their first year, but their story lives on.
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