The first Oxford women: What did they do?

HEPI sometimes reviews books on higher education. Today’s blog is a review by Nick Hillman OBE, HEPI’s CEO, of Joanna Miller’s novel The Eights, which recently came out in paperback. It is possibly our first review of a fiction, rather than non-fiction, book.

Confusingly, even though set at the University of Oxford, The Eights, the debut novel by Joanna Miller, is named not after rowing, nor is it about a group of eight people. Rather, it follows the first year of four women students at St Hugh’s College, who matriculate in 1920. This was the first year that the University of Oxford officially admitted women as full members and also awarded women degrees (rather than certificates).

As St Hugh’s is on St Margaret’s Road in north Oxford and HEPI’s office is just yards away, on the corner of St Margaret’s Road and the Banbury Road, it was entertaining to read about the local sights a century ago, many of which have not changed much. The spring cherry blossom, North Parade, Summertown, Oxford’s Covered Market, the University Parks, The King’s Head and White Horse pubs and the neighbouring Blackwell’s bookshop, the University Church and the Sheldonian Theatre, Radcliffe Camera and Bodleian Library all feature.

At the end of the book, the characters go up in an observation balloon used in the Great War and see some of the men’s colleges from on high, with their ‘lush green lawns, Gothic chapels, [and] narrow passageways inaccessible to the average person.’ The inside of the colleges may remain hard to reach*, but much of central Oxford today still resembles the city from a century or more ago, even if there was then no Westgate Shopping Centre, no infernal traffic filters and no surrounding science parks. (Ironically, it was significantly easier for many people to reach Oxford’s sights back then, for example by train on the old Varsity Line that connected the city to Cambridge, via Bedford and Bletchley, for over a hundred years until 1967.)

The four women whose lives are followed in the book are: Otto, the (slightly annoying) leader of the group who exudes confidence and already knows Oxford well from her war work; Beatrice, the Sapphic daughter of a famous (fictional) but rather unlikeable suffragette; Dora, portrayed as a beauty constantly admired by others, including the male students, and who has seen loss close up during the war; and Marianne, a quiet and seemingly fragile Rector’s daughter from Culham, who suffers from imposter syndrome but hides a secret.

They make an unlikely but tight friendship group whose first-year adventures include playing with an ouija board, illicit champagne drinking, stealing cutlery and coping with influenza. Student life changes more slowly than we sometimes like to admit. Otto and Marianne’s pre-student lives in particular were more eventful than their early months at Oxford, so the book is partly made up of wartime flashbacks.

The scenarios seem to capture the tensions present in Oxford after the Great War well. The male students and academics are generally vile to the women, while the female academics are painted unsympathetically as being rather too prim and proper for their own good while nonetheless fighting important battles.

We are shown how female students, in particular, were tightly controlled, unable to meet their male counterparts without a chaperone, despite their sometimes extensive wartime experiences. In a historical note at the end, the author recounts how the University of Oxford’s Congregation passed a statute limiting the number of female students to one-quarter of the men in 1927, which held for three decades. Another three decades on, the same body rejected an honorary degree for the UK’s first female Prime Minister. Today, however, women make up a majority of students at Oxford while men now fall materially behind at every stage of our education system.

In The Eights, the thoughts of Marianne, who is gradually revealed to be a much more interesting character than her early appearances imply, reflect the challenges faced by Oxford’s first women who were able to become full members of the University:

the Isis and student publications like it lambast Oxford women for being prudish old maids one week and frivolous husband-hunters the next. Women are mocked for being too dowdy or too attractive, too feeble-minded or too diligent. They are criticised for breaking rules, for slavishly adhering to rules, for using the university’s resources lavishly, for operating on a shoestring. For encouraging the “wrong sort” to apply to Oxford, and for driving the “right sort” to Cambridge. The truth of the matter is that with some men they can never win.

The book has been lauded and it is fun, evocative and well-written. I don’t suppose the author will thank me for the comparison, but the deep friendships and largely innocent escapades have something of an adult Famous Five or Malory Towers about them, though with the shadow of war and a desire to settle down affecting the main characters.

So it’s no wonder that piles of the book are seemingly to be found in every bookshop I enter. The telling of the tale, at least until close to the end, may be a tad too obvious in places and there are moments where you may wonder if the author had a checklist of 1920s cultural references by her side to work through (Agatha Christie, tick, Emily Davison, tick, Vera Brittan, tick, Radclyffe Hall, tick, DH Lawrence, tick, etc).

I read the first 100 pages or so assuming they were a set-up for a big adventure to come but – spoiler alert – it never quite arrives like that. If you don’t make my mistake, I daresay most HEPI readers will enjoy it a great deal – perhaps as much as most of my Book Club (of men and women) did.

* Search out cultural and spiritual events hosted in the colleges is my tip for seeing them. (To this end, let me give a shout out to the brilliant cast of the play ‘I Am A Camera’, performed in Keble College last week, which also evocatively showed the lives of young adults in the interwar period.)