"The Eights," by Joanna Miller

"The Eights" (Putnam, 2025), Joanna Miller's first novel, is the story of four young women who are members of Oxford University's first class of women who can actually earn degrees there. The year is 1920, and though women have been allowed to attend classes before, this right to earn degrees is an historic breakthrough. These four women, like all the citizens of the UK, have just been through World War I and its aftermath. Some of them volunteered in the war effort in various ways; some lost brothers and sweethearts during the war. The four women reside in the same section of the living quarters at St. Hugh's College, a women's college at Oxford, and they become an inseparable foursome, a sort of sisterhood. Despite their closeness, though, they each have secrets that they do not share until they have known each other for quite a while. The novel weaves together the various strands affecting these young women: the postwar memories and atmosphere, the academic life, the forwarding of women's rights, friendship, ambitions, romance, and the secrets that they carry. As a (now retired) woman academic myself, I have seen how even in the past few decades, women students and professors have struggled, and are still struggling, more than 100 years since the time period of this book, to gain true equality; although the discrimination may be less blatant, it is still there. This novel is both informative on historical matters and enjoyable to read.

Two Grief Memoirs by Writers Elizabeth Alexander and Geraldine Brooks

After the death of my husband over three years ago, I accumulated a stack of books about loss and grief. Some I read or at least skimmed, others I did not. Some were helpful, others were not. I have posted here about some of them. I have just read two more, both memoirs: "The Light of the World" (Grand Central, 2015), by the well-known poet Elizabeth Alexander, and "Memorial Days" (Viking, 2025) by the also well-known novelist Geraldine Brooks. I appreciate other types of grief-related books, but I am especially drawn to memoirs such as these two. In each case, the author lost her beloved husband suddenly. In both cases, the authors struggle with how to live their new lives without their husbands. Each of them alternates, in her chapters, among writing about the shocking event itself, the story of her past life with her husband, and the story of her slow and painful path to some kind of acceptance and path forward. As Alexander and Brooks are both gifted writers, their writing has a literary quality, filled with reflections, descriptions, and details that give readers access to the writers' (and consequently, at least somewhat, to the readers' own), deepest emotions and most acutely felt experiences. Both writers are generous in sharing with readers these intensely painful (but sometimes joyful in remembrance) feelings. In the tradition of, among others, fellow widowed writers Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates, their natural inclination is to try to process (that soulless but apt term) their grief through writing about it. Further, as in the cases of amany other grief memoirs, the books serve as loving tributes to the writers' late husbands. And they give readers, especially bereaved readers, a sense of connection and relatedness, and sometimes a bit of consolation and hope.