May’s Are You Sitting Comfortably?
The Eights by Joanna Miller
Get your mortar boards and gowns ready – we’re off to Oxford for May’s Are You Sitting Comfortably.
Our guest author is the brilliant Joanna Miller. Joanna Miller was raised in Cambridge and studied English at Exeter College, Oxford. In fact, she has studied at Oxford three times, studying English at Exeter College, returning to train as a teacher and most recently, graduating with a diploma in Creative Writing. After a decade working in education, she set up an award-winning poetry gift business and wrote thousands of poems to order with her rhyming verse filmed twice by the BBC. In 2015, Joanna won The Poetry Prize run by Bloomsbury Publishing and the National Literacy Trust. She is a graduate of the Faber Academy and was chosen for the Escalator Talent Development Scheme at The National Centre of Writing. This year will see her as Writer in Residence at Gladstone Library.
Unable to escape the lure of Oxford’s spires, she took to writing about them and her debut novel, The Eights, is a captivating novel set in Oxford 1920 and the first cohort of women undergraduates who took part in the ancient ceremony of matriculation.
For the first time in its 1000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students. Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight. They have come here from all walks of life and are thrown into an unlikely, life-affirming 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. Beatrice, politically-minded daughter of a famous suffragette, sees Oxford as a chance to make her own way – and her own friends – for the first time. Socialite Otto fills her room with extravagant luxuries but fears they won’t be enough to distract her from her memories of the war years. And quiet, clever, Marianne, the daughter of a village vicar, arrives bearing a secret she must hide from everyone – even The Eights – if she is to succeed.
Misogyny is still rife, influenza a threat, and the ghosts of the Great War are very real indeed. As The Eights – Dora, Beatrice, Otto and Marianne – navigate this tumultuous moment in time, their friendship will become more important than ever, in a story of sisterhood and friendship, of society and self. The Eights tells of the lives of four women making history, striving for change, and in the process changing each other.
There’s something so moving and absorbing about this wonderful novel about female friendship and Joanna’s beautiful writing transports the reader back to the 20s in a novel that is rooted in its time and setting.
Join us as on Wednesday 28th at 7pm on Instagram we chat to Joanna Miller about women reinventing themselves, the nostalgia of writing about Oxford and how the idea for The Eights came about.
