Writer in residence at Gladstone's Library and debut author Joanna Miller talks to us about her new book 'The Eights' and how it recreates the lives of Oxford University's first female students in 1920.
Joanna Miller was born and raised in Cambridge. She studied English at Oxford and later returned to the University to train as a teacher. After ten years in education, she set up an award-winning poetry gift business. During this time, she wrote thousands of poems to order and her rhyming verse was filmed by the BBC. Unable to resist the lure of the classroom, Joanna recently returned to Oxford University to study creative writing. She will be a writer in residence at Gladstone's Library in 2025. The Eights is her first novel and is published by Fig Tree. You can also find The Eights on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
We had very few books in our house that weren’t bibles or Baptist tracts. The only other books I remember were tiny-print paperbacks about the strange and bizarre. I became quite the expert on the Loch Ness monster and spontaneous combustion!
As a child, I was a voracious reader, consuming all the books in my primary school library. This rather irritated the headteacher who was constantly having to buy more. I sourced books from jumble sales too (a hardback set of Ruby Ferguson’s pony novels being my greatest coup) and borrowed from the library van that stopped on the village green.
I read English at Oxford and afterwards went into teaching and advising. I then turned my hobby of writing rhyming verse for special occasions into a business. It paid the bills for ten years!
I’d always wanted to write historical fiction but never dared try. My sister, Australian novelist Ali Lowe, encouraged me to take the Faber Academy ‘Write Your Novel’ course during lockdown. She pushed me to ‘just get on with it’ when I was faltering, and introduced me to her agent – who then became my agent too.
It took another year to get the manuscript into shape. It sold overnight to a German publisher, and at that moment, as I reproduced the Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility snort down the phone to my agent, everything changed. UK and US deals followed from Penguin Random House. It was all so incredible, that at times, I honestly thought they’d mixed me up with somebody else.
I work at an old writing bureau inherited from my grandparents. It’s quite low so my laptop is balanced on two fat biographies of suffragettes. My whippet, Birdie is currently curled up on the sofa beside me and one of our three cats, Mimi, is stretched out on the windowsill. Behind her, I can see a boat moored on the Grand Union Canal and a flock of geese in the half-flooded field beyond. We’re only six miles from the M25 but it’s surprisingly rural.
I try to get to my desk every morning as my head is clearest then, but I also find that 6pm is a productive time. I think it comes from having three children so close together – bathtime used to be chaos and years later I’ve retained the ability to summon laser focus at that time of day.
The Eights tells the story of the first women to study alongside men at Oxford University in the aftermath of the Great War.
Burning with dreams of equality, four young women move into neighbouring rooms in Corridor 8 of St Hugh’s College. Beatrice, Dora, Marianne, and Otto (collectively known as The Eights) come from all walks of life. Each has their own motives for being there and each has secrets they would rather not reveal. Thrown together, they form an unlikely, and unshakeable friendship.
But Oxford’s dreaming spires cast a dark shadow: in 1920 misogyny is rife, influenza is a threat, and, as the group discover, the ghosts of the Great War are very real indeed.
In many ways, the date chose itself. I wanted to recreate the lives of Oxford’s first women as accurately as possible and to highlight their hidden achievements. As 1920 was the first year that women were integrated (supposedly fully) into the university, I felt it offered many story-telling opportunities.
However, when I began researching, it became clear that the post-war era was a fast-changing and complex time, both socially and politically. I wondered how does society recover from such an ordeal? How did women reconcile their improved opportunities with the suffering inflicted by the Great War?
I enjoyed every moment of researching The Eights, especially when I came across something fascinating I knew would enhance the story. Social histories and memoirs were my starting point. A highlight was staying overnight at St Hugh’s College and reading firsthand accounts by students from the 1920s.
Oxford’s Bodleian Library kindly renewed my card after thirty years, allowing me to access hundreds of documents relating to the first women students. Some of these are reproduced in the novel. I discovered that the rules imposed on the women were incredibly strict; chaperones, curfews, no public dances, no alcohol, no talking to men before or after lectures. Students who broke rules were punished severely; one woman was excluded permanently for returning to her college five minutes late. The stuff of a debut novelist’s dreams!
The novel took shape from two ideas – Oxford’s first women and the WW1 practice trenches dug by officer cadets in my local forest. I wondered what might happen if a cadet fell in love with a local girl and encouraged her to go to Oxford.
The very first paragraph I wrote is still in the novel. It is a description of one of The Eights, Dora Greenwood, arriving at her college rooms in 1920. Dora is mourning her brother and her fiancé. Both were bound for Oxford, and Dora has come in their stead.
It is probably no coincidence that of all the characters, Dora and I are the most alike. We have both lost a brother and both in the same town, Berkhamsted.
I’m currently researching my second novel which is set ten years earlier. I am also considering a follow up of some kind to The Eights. Many early readers have expressed a desire for a sequel and I am not sure I want to let the characters go just yet!
I have been very fortunate, in that my agent and the team at Fig Tree Penguin are the best humans you could imagine. It was a wonderful moment seeing The Eights in book form for the first time, especially as the cover is so vibrant. I had a good cry, as I’m sure many authors do!
Because my sister is a novelist, I knew what to expect of the publishing process. I was already aware that there are swathes of time when nothing happens and then moments when you have to drop everything to meet a deadline. Initially, it is terrifying to imagine your book out there being read by publishing experts and early readers, but you soon get used to it.
I am freakishly good at darts. I picked it up at college, becoming Oxford University Women’s darts captain and sometimes playing for men’s teams. The last time I tried, after a hiatus of some ten years, I threw 180 at my first attempt.
