“The door will not stay open for long, Peggy. You must try to slip in while you can.”

Early on, when Mrs. Stoddard encourages Peggy to apply for a different position at the Press, Peggy is daunted by the cultured young woman in the office. This speaks to the theme of The Difficulties of Crossing Social Boundaries and shows Peggy’s own conviction that she is inferior, and doors will be shut against her, which contributes to her internal conflict as a character.

“‘An adventure,’ she said. ‘A chance to do something important. My ticket out of this place.’ Things she’d heard.”

This passage captures Maude’s use of echolalia to communicate, but the words she repeats capture the euphoric and confident tone of the country at the beginning of the war. Peggy feels the same optimistic hopes for her own life, but both her dream and the reality of the war take on a more melancholic tone later, providing dramatic and ironic contrast.

“The reader […] would never imagine all the hands their book had been through, all the folding and cutting and beating it had endured. They would never guess how noisy and smelly the life of that book had been before it was put in their hands. I loved that I knew this. That they didn’t.”

As much as she loves words and ideas and stories, Peggy also loves books themselves as physical objects, an appreciation evident in the imagery in this passage. The secret lives of books contains a metaphor for the secret, interior lives of people that they rarely let one another see and illustrates the theme of The Legacy of Literature and Ideas.

“I did this sometimes, hoping the face that looked back would be mine. But it was almost always Maude’s, and I would feel the discomfort of not knowing who I was.”

Her identical twinship with Maude creates a sense of conflict for Peggy as well as a metaphor for her sense of being bound to her sister. Peggy often sees Maude as a mirror of herself, rather than herself as her own person. Ironically, it is Maude’s ability to individuate, become independent, and seize her own opportunities that will provide a model for Peggy to do the same.

“We were Town, the students were Gown. Oil and water, usually.”

The difference between those who live in the town of Oxford and those who reside there to study and teach at the University is presented as two distinct and contrasting worlds that don’t blend, as the metaphor of oil and water suggests. This creates a source of tension for Peggy’s own wish to cross that divide, speaking to the theme of The Difficulties of Crossing Social Boundaries.

“The ease of her entry made me hate her, just a little.”

The reason people might bear hatred toward and fight one another is a thematic question the book pursues in terms of the war, but also in terms of the class divides that are part of Peggy’s life. Her frequently ambivalent feelings toward Gwen, whom she appreciates as a friend but also resents for her privileges, become an external representation of Peggy’s inward turmoil over her own sense of worth and deserving.

“I did enjoy it. I enjoyed being useful, I enjoyed talking to Gwen, I enjoyed walking along the High and pretending I was the only woman in Oxford who looked like me.”

When Peggy volunteers at the hospital, she is engaging in the first activity that is a pursuit she selected on her own, instead of following because it was expected. This gives her a sense of freedom and self that is new to her, but also one that she is unable to initially reconcile, as she is too bound by the idea of herself as Maude’s twin and caretaker.

“I have nursed my fair share of invisible men and for some it seems that the erasure of their face has silenced whatever they used to be. They seem lost to themselves.”

Tilda’s reflections on what she sees as a nurse near the front provide the novel’s contemplation on the impacts and devastation of war, reflecting the theme of The Challenge and Possibility of Healing After War. As a counterpart to the discussion of men’s sacrifices and heroism, Tilda provides a different perspective on the damage done, the emotional and physical toll on the soldiers, and the similar toll on those providing care. The work of men, as it is held to be distinct from the work of women, is a divide that the novel studies and ultimately dismantles.

“I watched as she wrote my name in the Somerville library ledger. I stared at it. Evidence. Of something. Not much. But something.”

For someone who struggles with her sense of self and has been told it isn’t her place to read the books, seeing her name entered into the ledger of the Somerville Library as a borrower is a monumental step for Peggy. This is foreshadowing for her efforts to be accepted into the college and her final success at admission.

“Maude understood […] [t]hat people spoke to fill the silence or pass the time; that, despite our mastery of words and our ability to put them together in infinitely varied ways, most of us struggled to say what we really meant.”

In a novel about words and their interpretation, Maude’s use of language provides an alternative perspective on meaning and usage. Throughout the book, Maude’s comments offer succinct insight into an emotional tone or a character motive, providing emphasis and adding tension.

“I looked up, took in the mask again. It was like the censor’s pen; it hid what the war had done, was doing. It hid him.”

Bastiaan’s scars are a symbol of the devastation and ruin of the war, and he wears the mask so other people won’t be made uncomfortable by his appearance. In using the analogy of the censor’s pen, which Tilda makes a plan to work around, Peggy’s observation suggests that it is better for the truth to be known—an important statement in a book about words and communication, while also speaking to The Challenge and Possibility of Healing After War.

“I hadn’t seen her die—I’d refused to—so I didn’t see the pain leave her, didn’t see her face relax, her limbs come to rest. I didn’t experience the quiet that came afterwards.”

Peggy’s avoidance of her mother’s death and the shame she feels about not visiting her mother’s grave speak to the novel’s larger themes about how people deal with death, loss, or disaster. Coming to terms with her mother’s influence on her life becomes an important part of Peggy’s character arc.

“Don’t forget, Peg […] If you shrink yourself to the smallness of your circumstances, you’ll soon disappear.”

Though she is not a character on the page, Peggy’s mother, who speaks this advice, is an ongoing source of inspiration to her, playing the role of mentor and guide with her books and opinions, and encouraging Peggy’s ambitions. Peggy’s character arc entails coming to terms with the way she has kept her own life small, as symbolized by Calliope, and taking the chance to have something more.

“To think of them otherwise, to think of them as ordinary men, might make this whole experience unendurable.”

Returning to the theme of why people might distinguish themselves from others and harm or try to kill others, the novel’s middle section looks at the similarities between people through the shared themes expressed in German poetry. Tilda’s melancholy statement as she nurses German prisoners shows that she sees more similarities than differences, which makes the whole idea of war even more terrible.

“They’re all the same, and nameless, like the men in those stories your ma liked so much. The men who died and died and died so Odysseus could be a hero. Haig is our Odysseus now, and the Somme offensive is his bloody journey to glory.”

The comparison between the war and the printing of Homer’s Odyssey bears on the themes of heroism and valor, which predominates the conversation around both enterprises. Tilda’s bitter statement, in keeping with her increasing sense of disillusionment, provides a realistic perspective on the war, untainted by propaganda. Her use of literary allusion to make sense of her wartime experiences also invokes The Legacy of Literature and Ideas.

“She’ll submit to it all for the chance to read the right books and gain the right knowledge. And one day she’ll get a first, and her chaperone from Oriel will get a second, and she will go on to chair a committee with little renumeration, and he will go on to run a company or a country and eventually become a lord. Any other questions?”

When Gwen explains to Peggy how she can gain access to the male-only libraries by having the escort of a male student from a college like Oriel, she goes on to paint a rhetorical picture of the unequal outcomes the male and female students can expect, reflecting The Difficulties of Crossing Social Boundaries. Gwen’s story reflects the reality for women during this historical period but also questions the reasons for such unequal assignments of value.

“After years of wanting my life to be different, here I was looking for reasons not to change. I’d always thought I was more than a bindery girl. Now, I was making excuses not to be.”

When Gwen first suggests the idea of getting a scholarship, Peggy shows her internal conflict in her fear that some barrier will keep her out of Somerville—specifically, knowing Ancient Greek, which comes to represent the difference in opportunities between women of her class and the women of Gwen’s. Peggy’s fear of failing is one of the ways her character is conflicted when confronted with The Difficulties of Crossing Social Boundaries.

“I suddenly realised she wanted nothing more than to humiliate me, remind me of my place. I was asking for something I shouldn’t be, and she thought she had the right to deny it.”

When Peggy tries to enter the Somerville library on her own, she encounters the barriers of her class in the physical form of the nursing sister who bars her way. This becomes a moment of challenge and triumph for Peggy as she asserts her right to read the books. The breaking down of boundaries in her personal life parallels that of the larger breaking down of social taboos and cultural boundaries due to the war.

“The text was so strange. It felt like a wall I couldn’t scale, a locked door I had no key to. It was the Bodleian, it was Oxford University, it was the ballot box. I couldn’t imagine ever being equipped to penetrate it.”

The Greek pages of the Odyssey become a symbol for all that Peggy feels she has been barred from because of her class, which includes not just physical spaces but certain social privileges and rights. Her initial failure at the exam only serves the novel’s larger argument that social change typically takes time and typically happens in small increments.

“A shift in the normal order of things. It can be uncomfortable for some but an opportunity for others. It seems appalling to think there might be a silver lining.”

Miss Garnell reflects on what Peggy has been seeing at the bindery, the blurring between traditionally gendered work roles. For the women who have been customarily undervalued, Miss Garnell notes that these changes can also be opportunities—though opportunities bought at a great price, as the novel also dwells on the destructive impacts of war.

“Somerville stood, as it always had, on the other side of the road. It was so close now, closer than it had ever been, but as I stared, it seemed to recede.”

This image of Somerville moving away from her captures Peggy’s fear that, after all her hard work, she won’t be admitted, proving that she hasn’t been good enough all along. This divide between Town and Gown is one of the boundaries in her life that Peggy will learn to cross.

“Standing there, between the Press and Somerville, I understood us […] Maude had never confused me for her—that was my error, my anxiety and burden. Maude was singular: one of a kind, Ma had always said. Like an illuminated manuscript, I thought. I was the one who took refuge in our pairing. She was my excuse. She’d always been my excuse.”

This moment of epiphany for Peggy, in which she acknowledges the difference between her own self-image and Maude’s image of herself, takes place as the girls stand between the two worlds they belong to: Maude is content with and suited for work at the bindery, while Peggy longs to attend Somerville. This moment of looking at her twin and finally seeing herself echoes the earlier moment when Peggy looks in a mirror and sees Maude.

“Since giving up on Somerville, I’d felt I’d lost a part of myself, the person I might have been. When I thought of my future, there was a space where there shouldn’t have been.”

Several characters in the book go through a character arc that concerns identity and endure the process of becoming more fully themselves. Peggy’s image of herself as feeling incomplete without Somerville—of feeling her failure like a physical loss—makes the final resolution in the Epilogue all the more rewarding for her.