A men’s only university, Oxford finally decides to grant women the right to earn degrees—after a thousand year history.  It wasn’t easy on the first women.  It is the 1920s and there are movements all over the western world to grant women new rights, including the rights to vote.  The struggle is fierce and opposed with violence and imprisonment.  

This novel gets its name from “Corridor 8” at St. Hughs College for Women at Oxford.  Four young women are housed in that corridor, become friends, and are known around campus at “the eights.”  

In a challenge for the author, all four women are presented as protagonists in the book, trading places during the course of the novel as the primary focus.  In a major weakness of the novel, we find ourselves wanting more depth in the stories of Otto and Beatrice.  

But altogether this piece of fiction provides an important insight into the struggle that women had at the beginning of the 20^th century, a struggle that is quite forgotten today.