JOANNA MILLER

Originally matriculating at Exeter College in 1987 to read English Literature, Joanna notes the difference between then and 2022, when she enrolled in Oxford’s two-year Diploma in Creative Writing. There were simply more female role models and teachers in 2022, she says, some of them ‘categorically influential’. It’s a reminder that even today Oxford is feeling its way towards complete gender equality, even as it has made great strides.

She made a bond especially with tutor Lucy Ayrton during the Diploma, a novelist focused on Oxford during World War Two.

Joanna’s debut novel The Eights, out in hardback from 17 April in the UK, concerns four young women who come up to Oxford in 1920, the first cohort allowed to matriculate and obtain full degrees following 40 years of representation, argument, internal dialogue and finally the social and political earthquake of World War One.

‘I looked at those photos of the first matriculants, and I wanted to know who were these individuals?’

The resulting world that Miller has created is fictional as are the four main characters Dora, Beatrice, Otto and Marianne, but it is carefully researched in regard to the atmospherics and particulars especially of St Hugh’s College, where the four women are neighbours on Corridor 8, hence the title.

The world of 1920, as well as the characters, are relatable yet the period detail and sense of accessing another world, right down to sometimes visceral atmospherics of place, smell and climate transport you away.

From the sharp whiff of Lysol to sanitary belts, currant buns in paper bags, cans of condensed milk and stupendous amounts of tea drinking, this is Oxford as it was then, re-imagined.

Gender and class drench the novel like boiling water through a porous coffee filter, as well they might. Many of the earlier female students at Oxford were the daughters of Anglican clergymen, and many of the early arguments within the first women’s colleges were about whether or not to accept non-conformists. Attending such discussion was a keen sense of class and status.

‘There was also the Latin and Greek requirement, to get in. That restricted the available pool of qualified applicants.’

There is a strong sense within the novel of fathers and brothers and the permission they granted to their daughters and sisters. The women were there because men had allowed them.

The novel fully brings to life Oxford in 1920, where ‘hems are rising, hats are simple and close-fitting, silhouettes are long and narrow.’

Actually, that refers to a backward glance at 1915, when the backdrop is the Great War, some college buildings have been requisitioned by government, and ‘on the streets, women are doing the jobs of men: conducting omnibuses, delivering parcels on bicycles, driving cars. They are dressed in plain working clothes, but their faces are animated and their voices loud and unapologetic.’

In fact the characters are all granted back stories, but only one, Dora, has lost a brother and a fiancé in the trenches at Cambrai, deliberately to not turn the book into a re-working of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, explains Joanna.

The novel begins with matriculation and there is a scene of the women being jostled by Freshmen who treat them as a foreign species. Later, real individual men make their approaches but within the invisible, walled enclosure of class assurance. The women have power too. Power to choose; the power of being attractive. There is a tension around the relative ease of gender mixing if you are upper class, like the character Otto, versus taking your studies seriously and making something of yourself.

The background dons and fellows and college Principals are typically modelled on real individuals and it greatly enhances the authenticity of the narrative.

In particular there is Miss E F Jourdain, Principal of St Hugh’s, modelled on the real person of that name.

She is depicted as unreasonably strict in matters of decorum and rules, but Miller says that this was accurate.

‘There was, I think, a fear of backlash or backsliding by the University in regard of letting women in, so women students tended to be strictly policed, by women as well as by men.’

She reminds me that on one occasion the film critic Dilys Powell was caught and sent down for scaling a wall to have tea with her fiancé. It made the front page of the Daily Mail and was a national story. In 1926 there was an Oxford Union debate about whether or not to raze the women’s colleges to the ground. ‘It was not unknown for male dons to ask that woman leave their lectures.’

We discuss the ornamental, and yet also pioneering, quality of early women at Oxford, as if the world of men didn’t know quite how to treat them. There were cartoons at the time of JCRs littered with baby carriages, as if to mark the dangerous implication of motherhood undermining the seriousness of study, or at least encroaching on a male sphere.

Within the novel, it is also noted how, for example, Otto, the most upper class of the four imagined women, with her velvet dresses and sable collars, had performed as a voluntary war nurse but failed. The trope here is an inability to be practical on account of being posh. The reader also discovers that she was set up in the role by her father who knew other influential men. Otto has access to a car and is wealthier than many dons.

Another idea at the time was that if you were clever you were ‘plain’; if you were ‘pretty’ then you were not serious. An invidious, not to say impossible, lose-lose situation for women at Oxford.

Another of the great, ‘real’ characters is Miss Rogers, a Classics tutor at St Hugh’s, famous for ‘flowing garments and outlandish hats'. She tells Otto that one of her hobbies is being ‘obstreperous’, but not to mistake her for a rebel; men and women should not fraternise, she opines, making it clear that the reason for that is not missing out on the education:

‘What’s the point in fighting as hard as we are, if it’s all thrown away over a love affair?’

It is historically the case, says Miller, that A M A H Rogers came top in the entrance exams and achieved a double first in Latin, Greek and Ancient History, in the ‘degree equivalent’ exams that women still had to sit in the 1880s.

‘She should have been offered an exhibition to Balliol or Worcester, but when discovered to be a woman, all she received was a set of books. Balliol College gave her place to the boy who came sixth.’

None of these vignettes of outrageous injustice dominate or detract from a vibrant novel about fully fledged personalities who bond very quickly upon entering Oxford together. The novel is about friendship, and about the transformative benefits of education.

‘We can all relate to it, this idea of the ‘found family’ – you suddenly and fiercely make new friendships upon entering university, perhaps especially Oxford with its short terms and intense study requirement.’

Just back from a fabulous book launch at Waterstones Oxford, which was attended by several post-holders from St Hugh’s, Joanna notes that The Eights is already translated into German and French and will be sold in North America, Australia, South Africa and India. The first of a long list of bookshop launches was in Berkhamsted, where Joanna is based.

As is normal now for QUAD, we ask Joanna what her advice is to aspiring novelists who haven’t yet got a contract.

‘Take a good course such as Faber Academy's 'Writing a Novel'.’

Joanna did that as well as the Oxford Diploma.

‘By the end you will have at least 30,000 words, enough to approach agents.’ She signed with Soho Agency shortly after the Faber course, as well as noting what a rich experience it was; also that the Oxford course forces you to write and consider poetry, screen writing, multiple genres, ‘the scripts were very good for the spoken dialogue, of which there is so much in The Eights.’

The former English teacher adds that she had already been in the habit of writing daily for a poetry gift business she set up, and ‘reading voraciously my whole life’.

So, without giving anything away, this novel is your chance to discover Oxford in 1920 and to get to know four characters thrown together:

‘They knew they were changing history. They didn’t know they would change each other.’