The Eights by Joanna Miller

In this episode of Historical Happy Hour, bestselling author and host Jane Healey sits down with debut novelist Joanna Miller to discuss The Eights, a richly imagined and impeccably researched historical novel about the first women to study alongside men at Oxford University in 1920. Joanna shares how the novel was born during lockdown, how real archives and immersive research shaped the vivid setting and layered characters, and why this untold story of female friendship, ambition, and societal change feels both timely and timeless. From her background in rhyming poetry to her creative process as a novelist, Joanna offers a heartfelt look into how history can inspire fiction—and how storytelling can reclaim forgotten voices.

Transcript

Jane: 0:03

Happy Hour, the podcast that explores new and exciting historical fiction novels. I'm your host, Jane Healy, and in today's episode I welcome Jo Joanna Miller to discuss her debut novel, the Eights, which is getting all the buzz and which fresh fiction highly recommended calling it. Impeccably researched and eloquently told. Welcome Joanna. Thanks for doing this.

Joanna: 0:25

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Jane: 0:28

Great. Joanna Miller was raised in Cambridge in the United Kingdom and studied English at Oxford University. After a decade in education, she set up an award-winning poetry gift business and her rhyme. And her rhyming ver verse has been filmed twice by the B, B, C. I have a question about that for sure. Miller recently graduated from Oxford again with a diploma in creative writing. She lives with her husband and three children in Hertfordshire Shire. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Hertford Hartford. Is her first novel. So again, welcome. Talk about the premise of this terrific story of four young women who blazed the trail at Oxford and how you came to write it.

Joanna: 1:10

Okay so it's the story of the first women to study alongside men at Oxford in 1920. In the shadow of the Great War. There were women studying at Oxford before that but they were the women that blazed the trail for these initial pioneers. And my story is about four women who move in together on. Staircase eight of St. Hughes College and become firm friends in the face of male resentment and strict rules and their own personal secrets and traumas that become are revealed along the way. And I decided to write this book in lockdown, partly because my poetry business had gone very quiet. I had no customers and no weddings to write for and things like that. So I decided to do a write your Novel course, and it happened to be the 100th anniversary of women getting degrees at Oxford for the first time, and Oxford University had been sharing pictures, gorgeous black and white CP photos of some very serious. Say that again. Some very serious faced young women who looked, not unlike my own daughter and her friend, so I wondered what had brought them there and what had been their experience of Ox Oxford compared to the one I had in the 1980s? So I, when I started to research, I realized, oh my goodness, the strict rules and the way that they were treated will make for a brilliant novel. And I combine that with a bit of local history about the town where I live, which had some soldiers there as a garrison in the First World War and combined the two and came up with the

Jane: 2:44

story of the eights. Excellent. Yeah. So I wanna talk about your research because you attended Oxford and you said that this novel was a joy to research. Talk about your research process, your discovery and what, if anything, surprised you along the way.

Joanna: 3:01

My research process was a little unorthodox because I'm not a historian, so I was scrambling around at first for where I could find information. But luckily, Oxford University had instigated a research project based on a hundred years of women getting degrees. So I was able to use those resources and luckily because I'm an alumna at the university, I could go online and. Read them in the, their digital forms, in the bodily and library archives. So that's where I started. I also read social memoirs and did an awful lot of Googling of looking at places that I wanted to go to and went to those places as soon as I could, as soon as lockdown was lifted. In fact, I dragged my husband and my dog at least. 50 times, and I'm not exaggerating, around Oxford every Sunday morning where we would have the familiar coffee stops and pit stops. And I would trace the route that my characters would take and go to the buildings that they would've gone to. And I saw the town in or the city in every different season. So I could even accurately portray the color of the sandstone at different times of year, depending on how much sun was on it or how wet it was. So I was a little bit obsessive because I really got into all the fine details. I wanted it to be a very honest portrayal of what it was like to be a young woman at Oxford University in 1920, and that included. The buildings, but also the experience that the women had and what they did day to day. So I was lucky enough to get into St. Hughes College after lockdown lifted and was able to look at around the college and look in their archives. At firsthand accounts by students in the 1920s written in the most glorious blue ink. And telling answering questions about what they did with their time, who their favorite tutors were. Did anyone ever get in trouble? What were their favorite anecdotes? I was really lucky and privileged to see these and also very relieved that the research that I got had done had proved accurate and that in fact what I portrayed or how I portrayed my girls living their lives was in fact the way that a lot of these women as St. Hughes had, I. And the best bit of all was I got to sleep overnight in the college. By this point, I was completely convinced that my four characters were real and had existed. So I was walking around and thinking, oh, that would've been bitch's room, and that would've been indoors, and they would've walked down here, and that would've been at the time they rescued the kittens and et cetera, et cetera. I really was immersed in Oxford and Lucky I only live an hour away, so I was able to go a lot. And I ended up doing a diploma in creative writing while I was writing the book because I got so caught up with the university again and how it felt to be there that I just wanted to be part of it. So I did a two year undergraduate diploma in creative writing alongside. Editing the novel with my English and US editors. Yeah, Oxford was very much an ongoing part. This book and I channeled a lot a lot of my own experiences of being a student there three times. Now

Jane: 6:08

Amazing. Yeah. And the research really shines through in the story. And I love books where the setting almost seems like another character, like in the book. And that I felt that when I was reading this. I wanna talk about speaking of the four main characters, the four women. Really distinct, developed. Dora Beatrice, Maryann and Otto. None of them are based directly on any of the women at the time. There's I think I got that. There's, so from your notes that they're composites really, is that what it would you say? And how did you develop these characters? How did, what was their origin stories and what was your character since this is your debut, like what was your character development process like?

Joanna: 6:47

I began with a 2000 word opening to the novel that I had to produce my novel writing course. So it the subject of that was Dora and I was writing about how Dora had come to the university but had lost her brother and her fiance in the war, and that Dora had lived in the town where I live now. And once I started writing about her and about. And realizing that this sort of was a very much a community experience. This first year of studying alongside men, I realized that it would've worked just to have one character's perspective. I wanted to show more. After all. I was writing about almost about a feminist movement, and about the result of. 50 years of hard work and negotiation on the part of the women that came before. So it felt natural to write about a group of women. And for some reason a group of four women felt natural. I dunno if it, it came from reading a lot of little women when I was younger or watching Sarah Jessica Parker and her friends and Sex and the city. Who knows. But four felt right to me and it also felt. Symmetrical and tied in with my sort of theme of the number eight that runs through the novel. I wanted four women who were very different. To keep the reader interested and to keep them from confusing them too much. I had to make them very physically, very different. So bitch is the six foot tall. Otto is very short. Marianne is very pale with a long neck. And Dora is the the beautiful English rose with dark, curly brunette hair. And character wise, I was looking at where these women would've come from and trying to represent a different background. So a lot of women that studied Oxford came from families where their father was a vicar or a clergyman. Because only they could be taught Greek and Latin to a high enough standard in order to get into the university. It wasn't taught very well in girls schools. So I knew I had to have a vicar's daughter. I'd already got Dora who lived in my town, which is a market town, so I needed her to probably have a. Father who owned a Thatcher or a business, I then realized that I needed to represent the aristocracy. Not that many of them sent their children to university or their daughters to university. Their sons, yes, but not their daughters. So I thought that would be interesting to play around with. And Otto is the Aristo with a gorgeous wardrobe and all the money to throw around. She's the rule breaker. She's the funny one. So you need a funny one. It can't all be serious. And then there was Beatrice, I got really interested in the idea when I was researching of what it would be like to be the daughter of a suffragette because I realized that famous suffragettes, including Emily Davison, who threw herself under the King's horse at the Derby and and was killed and became a kind of. National icon for that reason. She'd actually went to St. Hughes for a term. And so I would thought, wow, I'm gonna have one of them be the daughter of a famous suffragette who's been to St. Hughes. And then I can explore that topic too. And about, part of the reason being the women are there is that they've now got the vote and they can now do certain jobs that they couldn't do before, like work in the civil service. And then the final reason for them all being there was really a, apart from their own sort of personal ambitions was the fact that the war meant there weren't many husbands around. And there was a big pressure on women to either be able to support themselves financially or to move overseas to find a husband or. To change the way the course of their lives and how they thought their lives were going to go basically. So Dora in particular is quite worried about not finding a husband, and the only reason her mother has let her go to Oxford is because she knows the women are outnumbered five to one. She the best opportunity Dora has got. So basically, I was investigating a lot of different ideas and themes surrounding the sort of women that would've gone at that time.

Jane: 10:36

Yeah, no. Excellent. And so I wanna talk about because I ask. Every writer that comes on about process. And I'm particularly interested in yours because this was your first time out and even though you have a literary background, so what was your pro novel writing process like? I always ask writers, are you a plotter? Are you a pants? Do you plot the whole novel out first or do you write by the seat of your pants? Just sit down every morning and type away what was your process like? I

Joanna: 11:04

think it was a bit of a mixture of both. I would have an idea that I knew was gonna come next, and then I would work towards that, and then I would think where can we go from there? And then ideas would branch out. I think when I got to, around a third of the way through, I was very much more of a planner because I knew where it was going, but I think it was a bit. Pantsy at the beginning when I was feeling my way in. And also I was learning how to write a novel because I hadn't tried to write a novel before. Although I did have a daily writing habit. It was rhyming burst, so slightly different. So I was finding my way a little bit at the beginning. But one of the most useful things that we discussed on our write your novel course was the idea of creating a big chart, and I found that very useful. Got a really enormous piece of card and tracked the three terms that Oxford have, the seasons, what the weather would've been like, what plants would've been growing. What events were going on at the university and those particular terms where each girl was going in her arc in terms of sort of crisis and resolution. And I have found that I'm actually quite visually stimulated, so as well as needing to go to Oxford, seeing the things I was writing about, I found it really helpful to plot things and have that sort of overarching, not in detail, but have an overarching sense. Where we were going or I was going. Another thing that I did that really helped was color coding. So trying to balance between the four points of view, trying not to be too heavy to one person. So I would have phases where they would all have a different font or they'd all have a different color, and then I could look back and see where, where I needed to emphasize and where I needed to cut. I found managing the actual whole 90,000 words quite difficult because if you've never done it before, any manage that sort of thing, and you are working on a Word document, I think it could be quite overwhelming. I. I remember asking, we used to have sort of famous authors come to talk to us on the course, and people would be asking them very intellectual questions, and then I'd be saying, so how do you manage 90,000 words? Do you just scroll down or do you just make it really small and so you can see all the

Jane: 13:13

yeah,

Joanna: 13:13

All those nitty gritties of actually physically managing it. But one thing I did do that I don't know how many other writers do, was that I wrote key scenes first. So one of the first scenes I wrote is actually in the middle of the novel, and it's the one where everything changes for Dora. I'm not gonna say what happens, but you've read it and you'll know how key it is to, to the second half of the novel. And I wrote that fairly early on, probably bef when I'd only written about 10,000 words, but it appears about 40,000 words in. So I knew that the novel was shaping around this particular moment. And I found that quite useful. So it wasn't chron written in chronological order. I.

Jane: 13:57

Say that again. I'm sorry.

Joanna: 13:59

I dunno how normal that is. Not to write in chronological order.

Jane: 14:02

No, I think that everyone's process is so different and that's what Fascinate fascinates me about talking to different writers.'cause I think that some do I. Write the big scenes like the kind of turning point scenes and they can write, so they can write towards that. You know what I mean? The different, the beats of the story. And then I have a couple friends who are like, oh, I just sit down every morning and see what comes to me. And I'm like, what is that? Like I, I'm much more a planner. Like I have to know, like at least have a rough roadmap of where I'm going. Yeah, it's fascinating. I'm very chronological though. I've only. Written out of sequence a couple times. But it, like you said, it's like when that kind of scene comes to you that's, that you know is gonna be gonna matter. I, and you just have to get it down. I think that, yeah. So interesting. So you use Microsoft Word I know most writers on here are either word people or Scrivener. Which I, I use, but I only use like 10% of its capabilities. But yeah, that, oh, that's interesting too. So you don't use Scrivener at all?

Joanna: 15:01

No, I've heard of people over here that do, but I'm a bit of I'm a bit of a habitual sort of person and I it's almost the case of, so I feel like I've done well with words, so I should stick with words. Oh

Jane: 15:11

yeah, exactly.

Joanna: 15:12

Superstition. I always go to the same place on holiday. I'm that sort of person. I get it.

Jane: 15:18

Do you, what works for you? Another question I had relating to process and the writing of this. It's told as you mentioned, from multiple, from the different girls' points of view, depending on the scene and where you're at in the story. There's also goes back and forth in time a little bit. Was that always the intent? Like I, and was that tricky because I am not I haven't written a multiple POV novel yet. And and I, it, of course it obviously works, but it's, it strikes me as being a little bit tricky to, to manage.

Joanna: 15:48

Yeah, it I did find it tricky. I wasn't sure whether I should have a one chapter per character point of view, or I should have the chapters moving between them, trying not to head hoc too much I was wondering how best to manage that and I felt. Four characters. I know other people can do this brilliantly, but I felt I didn't want to have a chapter per person. And then by the time I get to chapter five, return to the person whose story is in chapter one, I felt that would be the cha, the reader would feel a disconnect from the character. So I wanted to keep rolling between them. Yeah it's got this almost filmic. Feel about it, I've been told. So you'll go into a chapter and you'll probably have three to four different points of view through that chapter, and I will choose the person for whom the point of view gives us the be the reader, the best experience, basically. The story on. But I did sometimes find, I get to the point and think, oh, I've had too much of that person's view of everything. I must go back and perhaps. Think about it from somebody else's point of view. So there was a lot of revising and reworking and trying. Sometimes I would have to rewrite a scene from someone else's in someone else's voice. And therefore the sort of language and imagery that they would use that was so different from the original person that in fact, it was just like starting the scene again. Oh yeah. So it was constantly working hard at it. I did because I was new to novel writing, I did quite a lot of study of the craft, particularly in the first two years when I was wr writing the first draft and then editing it. So if I felt I found something quite tough, then I might go and do a quick course on it or read up on it or get some help from my mentor so that I could refine, the areas that I thought were potentially weaknesses. So yeah, I really enjoy that. I'm a bit of a lifelong learner. Learner, as you've probably gathered. I'm sorry, my dog has decided to scratch. Oh, he's so cute.

Jane: 17:46

Mine's upstairs. I keep saying his.

Joanna: 17:53

Oh, cute. So sorry about that, everybody. Yeah, I did find it hard, but I learned all the time. Yes, I wouldn't necessarily do it the same way next time, but perhaps I would. But I will be starting with key scenes, that's for sure. I just find that it explodes my excitement and my interest in the story by thinking about a very dramatic moment.

Jane: 18:13

Yeah. Yeah, that makes total sense. I love you have your historical note at the end. You have a glossary, a timeline, a bibliography, like all the stuff that historical research nerds love. I love all this stuff. I, and I even noticed that in your author's note, you and I'm I'm, I get so obsessed with this too. Like you noted about you had to change the weather in January.'cause it wasn't the weather on record at the time. It was actually a bmy Jan January and you made it colder. So how did how did you balance the historical facts of the story of the time with the fictional story that you were telling and were there any strict rules you adhere to? How did you manage that balance? I.

Joanna: 18:55

I think one rule I had for myself was I wanted to tell the story and the lifestyle of the first women at Oxford as accurately as possible as a kind of tribute, because no one else has really written a novel about. This experience. I think the closest we get to it that I know of is Pip Williams novels that are set just before this time in Oxford. So I wanted to do them justice, so I wanted that all to be correct. And I wanted to pick out though the more interesting parts the. The times where they have to walk outta the theater because it's quarter to 11. If they don't get home at 11, they're gonna be sent down by the principal and punished. Severely. So I enjoyed picking out what I thought were the interesting historical facts and emphasizing those and perhaps playing down the more mundane ones as but I pretty much knew straight away that these would be fictional characters just because it would be hard to write. About four people and find out about their lives. It would give me so much more freedom to write about, to write their arcs and decide what happened to them. And, but I, what I did do is populate the novel with quite a few cameos of real people. The principle of St. Hughes had such an interesting life. There was no point fictionalizing her. I couldn't have done a better job than the actual real version. It was so entertaining. And there's a bit of Vera Britain and some famous tutors that I kept which I felt. Gave authenticity to the environment and emphasized also that I wasn't focusing on perhaps famous tutors or famous students like Ver Britain or women that had gone on to done to do very famous things. I was focusing on perhaps more ordinary women who sometimes struggled with their studies. Struggled being with being able to afford to be there. And I know that we today would not see them as ordinary women, but they saw themselves as ordinary women. In fact, Vera Britain describes them in her memoir, Testament of Youth. There's those sorts of women at Oxford as quote the lower millstone. So there was an intellectual slobbery about some of the women that turned up there. For looking for husbands or looking to extend their school life, et cetera. So yeah, I thought it would be very interesting to pick and choose balance between what was real and what wasn't. And it felt like a little bit of a privilege actually to read a bit of research and think I won't have that. Oh, but I will have that juicy little, yeah. And I was finding those juicy little bits right until the last moment, till I was writing the acknowledgements oh wow. And thinking, oh, I've got to put that in. That's just great. So a lot of things that happen to the girls, although the girls are fictional, pretty much everything that's happens to them is real. So there's, for example, there isn't a debate where. They discuss whether women have a place right to be at Oxford. And it's a key part of the novel. And there was a debate like that in 1926, as I explained at the back of the the novel. And they debated should women's colleges be raised to the ground and the motion was passed. That was disastrous. I'm not gonna tell you what, whether the motion in my novel was passed or. It was it was sometimes a case that that fact was so fictional it served the purpose. It, it made a brilliant novel and a great story for itself.

Jane: 22:15

Oh yeah. And it is really hard to believe that this was not that long ago. This, that and the way that women were treated and the way that women's education was treated it's astonishing when you think about it now. My daughters are both in college and, yeah, it's just, it's a different, it's such a different world, but yet, only like a generation or so ago. Yeah. Really interesting.

Joanna: 22:35

I was there 60 years after the novelist set, or 67 years after to be exact 1987. And I don't think things have changed that much. And a lot of people that I've spoken to agree that they've changed more since 1987 than they did in the period between when the novelist set, when I went to a full men's college that are just let in women and it was built for men and it was run in a very masculine. Sort of way. For example, we were young girls living on a mixed staircase where we had to go upstairs, two or three flights to go to the toilet in the middle of the night. We had a male cleaner or scout that they were called, they're called in Oxford, who would come into our bedrooms in the morning and open the curtains and lere at us. And we were 18 years old. We didn't know whether this was loud or not. So there was a lot that needed to change Still. Wow, that's really interesting.

Jane: 23:26

Unbelievable. Really. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad it's improved since then, but that's that's un that's unbelievable. So that, this is your debut. Have you always wanted to write novels? Have you always wanted to be a novelist or is this something you've had in the back of your head, or is it just came about with this story?

Joanna: 23:44

I think if you'd said to me from about the age of 18, what was it you'd really to do? What would be your kind of goal or dream? I would've said to write a novel, but I would never have believed that I could actually do it. It was only until I was 50 that I had the confidence to, and there are various reasons why that came about. One of them is that my sister is a novelist and she's eight years younger than me. She lives in Australia. Her name's Ali Lowe. She's written four bestselling novels out there, crime novels. And I think knowing someone close to you. That can do this and has achieved it, I think makes it feel more believable for a start. And she encouraged me to take the write your novel course. So she's been a huge inspiration and influence and encouragement and the best piece of advice I've ever had for her when I was worrying about, how to get through about the first third of the first draft was to, stop. Stop messing about, I won't say her exact words'cause they're a bit rude. Stop messing about and just get on with it. And that was really handy advice. So then the fact that when I think I got to 50 and I got, became menopausal, I thought, I don't care what people think anymore I'm just gonna go and do it. There's certain amount of bravado that, that comes with not caring. And I think lockdown had something to do with it as well. This sort of sense of you, we come to face-to-face with our own mortality and the world that we've come to know and that everything that is routine around us changes and perhaps maybe our ways of thinking changes too, about what is possible and about what the world can be. Or maybe. So I think I was a little thrown up. My life was thrown up in the air like everybody else's, and this is, it fell down with this sort of suggestion of what are you gonna do with your time? My business had also took me from writing every day to not writing. So I need, I used to write for weddings and big events. I used to create products that sold in big shops. When all that demand disappeared, I was not getting a creative outlet. But I think the one thing that surprised me more than anything was that when I actually started this course and started writing, I was actually quite good at it. And I think it came from years of teaching, years of studying classic works, years of writing every day, and most importantly years of voracious reading reading all the time. Yes. And admiring, writers, admiring novelists. They were my, they always have been my rock stars. Yeah it was always buried, but not something I ever thought was for me, that I thought was for other people. Yeah. So it's over too late. It's

Jane: 26:22

No. It's so amazing. And so talk a little bit about your poetry business, essentially. Like what did. I that discipline of having to write all the time or write on deadline. I used to do freelance, journalism work and the discipline of a deadline. I think it definitely helps in terms of trying to take a bigger, long form project, like a novel. So what was your work like and how was that kind of writing different than this kind of writing?

Joanna: 26:48

My sister and I have always had a really bizarre knack of being able to rhyme everything And we would write silly poems for special occasions and I've been doing it since I was a child. I remember I wrote one for my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary in rhyme. And I think it was quite probably a bit role dar influence. At the time where Revolting Rhymes came out. I would be writing these for everybody, all in sundry, and I'd do it for a bottle of wine or a bunch of flowers. And I got to my 40th birthday party and, read out my poem. And some of my husband's drunken friends came up to me and said, I'd pay good money for a poem like that to read out at my own event. And we were just at that stage in our lives where people were, kids were getting Chris and people were getting married, parents were turning, 60, 70. And so I thought, okay, oh, set up a website. I wasn't working as a teacher'cause I just had my third child. And so I thought I could do this, in the middle of the day when he's asleep and set up a website. And suddenly I just started to get lots of orders. And then the people that had heard the poems at their events would start ordering them and then their friends would start ordering them. And then I had to get a team of people in to help me write them. And then I started to sell on some equivalents of Etsy over here in the uk and on Etsy. But there's one called Not On the High Street, which did, was doing really well here at the time, and we decided to we, I decided to make some products, they said, why don't you write some shorter poems and make little posters of them or put them on mugs or makeup bags or cards. And so we just made, we ended up buying machinery, taking on a studio, making all sorts of things. So it might be a mug that said stroppy before coffee or, killing time before wine. So it might just be, it just might rhyme or on makeup bags, it would be similar lusher in Blusher Divine or in eyeliner or something like that. So the team always rhyme and we may. Calendars, whatnot. It was a great time. And I only employed mothers that worked from 10 to two. And they we only had one rule, which was if your kid had a show at school, then you had to go to the show. And you were allowed the time off. So it was flexible. Working for moms basically.

Jane: 29:00

Amazing. So amazing.

Joanna: 29:03

So it just, but it taught me to, with constantly writing these poems for special occasions, was when we sent out the questionnaire and the answers came back, it taught me to be able to spot very quickly what an interesting detail was and how to tell a story. So in the beginning, a middle and an end, and with always having the listener or the reader in mind. And so when I came to writing a novel, I think I was already thinking about the reader and thinking about it perhaps more of a commercial way than other people might have been if they'd been in my, situation of starting without having any experience. So I think that all, it all helped.

Jane: 29:41

Absolutely. Oh yeah. Ab, absolutely. So fascinating. So now this came out in April, so what has been the most surprising part of being a debut author?

Joanna: 29:53

Oh gosh. I was pretty surprised when Putnam invited me over to America in October. Yay Putnam. Thank you. And I got to do a fantastic tour. So with proof copies with five other authors four from the uk. We visited New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and la and we met books to grammars journalists. People from Good Reads all all sorts of bookshop owners. And we had just the most wonderful time. And that was a completely unexpected, huge perk and something that I will remember for the whole of my life.

Jane: 30:28

Oh,

Joanna: 30:29

nice. It was re really special. And there've been many wonderful moments. For example, when Tracy Chevalier's quote from the novel Blur, which is on the front of the novel, came through and I was driving back from London, it was late at night over here, but not Dr. Not for you guys. And it just dropped into my inbox and I could see it said my editor said, oh, we've had a lovely quote in from somebody. It's from Tracy. And then I couldn't read the rest of the email'cause I had to click on it. And I thought, oh, there must be some ordinary Tracy who then, you know, Tracy Smith. Tracy. I can't think of a Tracy that that I know. I know. Oh and then I clicked on it and I saw it was Tracy Shevalier. I was like, oh my God. And I was there, there was a bit of screaming. And then the first thing I did was ring my sister in Australia because it was the evening, it was the morning for her. And we did some more screaming and yeah. So that was a really wonderful moment. Oh,

Jane: 31:22

that's wonderful. I know I I've had to, get blurbs for my books and especially for my first one I've never forgotten that kindness, of these authors who are so kind and generous to take the time to read and endorse. Endorse your book, especially a big name and they don't know you that and I, it's just amazing, like people's kindness and generosity is in this industry is really lovely. Oh,

Joanna: 31:43

I completely agree. Yeah, and especially people of my women of my age. I dunno whether it is something about that, that sort of. Beginning a new journey at the age of 50 maybe appeals to other people of the same age, but even, books to grammars, the time they take to share your book. The care they take in reviewing it and taking beautiful photographs. It's really wonderful. Wonderful. The booksellers who keep their books book windows with a front of the UK edition, which is different to the US edition. So I'll just show that it's got a little okay. It's got a little woman riding on a bicycle and it makes for a good window display that bottom section.

Jane: 32:25

I love them both. And I'm always so interested in the choices that are made.'cause they're both they're both beautiful but just very different. Yeah. And I don't know what, how they decided, but they both work and apparently this is one's gonna work better in the us. I don't know, so funny.

Joanna: 32:40

I love them both. Don't ask me to. It would be.

Jane: 32:44

Yeah. No, they're both. Yeah.'cause I noticed that one when I was doing research for the interview and yeah, it's completely different but still but beautiful in its own, in, in just a different way. Yeah. So funny. And I will tell you too regarding like Instagrammers and I knew of this book before before we had booked this interview. It was definitely getting the buzz on social media. And so congratulations on that too.'cause that's not easy. So yeah. Thank you.

Joanna: 33:10

I think sometimes things happen to me and I'm not sure. Whether they happen to everybody else or not. And my agent often says to me, you do know this doesn't happen ordinarily happen.

Jane: 33:21

That's right.

Joanna: 33:24

Yeah. I've been so blessed, so lucky, and I, believe me, I have appreciated every single. Moment and I'm soaking it up. I'm really enjoying it. It's yeah, it's been a, I know it's a cliche, but it has definitely been a dream come true, that's for sure.

Jane: 33:40

Oh yeah. I'm so happy to hear that. I have a couple more questions. I don't wanna take up too much more of your time. Are you ready to share what you're working on next?

Joanna: 33:49

I can give you a little bit of a clue. It's set 10 years before. The eights roughly. And it's regarding suffragettes.

Jane: 33:58

Oh, nice.

Joanna: 34:00

Oh, exciting. Yeah. Oh, that's great. It's something that I felt that I would like to have discussed more in the eights, but there just wasn't the case for it.

Jane: 34:08

Oh, excellent. Everyone will look forward to that, I'm sure. And how how can readers best keep in touch with you,

Joanna: 34:14

Through social media? I'm most active on Instagram. On Instagram. Okay. And but it, my contact details are on my website as well.

Jane: 34:24

And your website is joanna miller.com or,

Joanna: 34:27

Joanna Miller, author

Jane: 34:29

Jo Joanna Miller, author. Okay.

Joanna: 34:31

Got it.

Jane: 34:32

Excellent. Joanna, this was delightful. Thank you so much. Congratulations on all your success with this beautiful debut and I hope it's continues to soar. And hopefully you can come on historical happy hour for your next book as well.

Joanna: 34:46

Thanks so much for having me. It's been lovely. And congratulations on your work as well. Oh, your latest background.

Jane: 34:53

Oh, thank you so much. Thank you again, Joanna, and best of luck and take care.