The Eights

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. Agent: Marina de Passe, Soho Agency. (Apr.)