I really loved this book about four young women attending Oxford University in the year 1920, just as women were being granted degrees for the first time (though with many, many strictures and stipulations that did not apply to male students, including needing to have a chaperone virtually anywhere they went outside their college, and receiving their degrees in a separate ceremony from the one in which the men were granted theirs).

It reminded me, of course, of my favourite novel, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, which is set about 15 years later than this book (and written in the year it’s set, 1935) as Harriet Vane is returning for a reunion — so Harriet would have been a contemporary, more or less, of the young women in this novel. Unlike Sayers, Miller puts her undergraduates at a real, rather than a fictional, Oxford women’s college (Sayers, living in the time she was writing about, probably felt she needed the shield of a fictional college to avoid the criticism of writing too closely about real people) and she mixes some actual historical figures in with her fictional characters. The excitement and ambiguity the girls themselves feel about being at Oxford, along with the way the recently-ended Great War still casts its shadow over everything, made this novel feel like a very realistic depiction of place and time.