The Odd Women (RARE BOOKS)

The Odd Women explores the idea of all the “Odd Women” of Victorian England, those women left over after all the more marriageable people have been paired off. Some of the characters – particularly Rhoda Nunn and Mary Barfoot embrace their status as single independent women and in them Gissing rather satirises the “New Women” of the 1890’s.

As the novel opens in 1872 the Madden sisters are living in their Somerset home with their widowed father, their lives are quiet and seemingly idyllic. Although not hugely wealthy their father is comfortable and will be able to provide well for his daughters, although his projected fifteen more years of work is cut tragically short by his sudden death. His daughters are left to fend for themselves in the world.

Fifteen years later and their fortunes are very different, the two elder sisters Alice and Virginia are in London, living in grim lodgings, in between positions as a governess and companion, their lives are hard. They are afraid to use the capital they inherited from their father, and so instead continue to live on just a few shillings a week. Their younger sister Monica is a shop girl, enduring dreadfully long hours, while living above the shop with the other shop girls. Alice and Virginia are thrown together with the bluestocking reactionary Rhoda Nunn, who they kNew in their girlhood, and Mary Barfoot, who run a small establishment training young women in typing and shorthand, sending them out into the world as “New Women” who will be able to support themselves as office clerks. Rhoda professes to be vehemently against marriage – despising the weak women who settle for married life, and having no compassion at all for a poor young woman who strays from the moral path of Victorian society.

Monica is all set to become one Rhoda and Mary’s pupils, but Monica is less keen on the idea of supporting herself as those around her may suppose. Monica is terribly afraid of her sisters’ fate – and this fear leads her to make a hasty marriage. Practically stalked by a much older man – but one who has a bit of money and his own home – Monica thinks she is saving herself from a far worse fate than marrying a man she doesn’t really love.

“Never had it occurred to Widdowson that a wife remains an individual, with rights and obligations independent of her wifely condition. Everything he said presupposed his own supremacy, he took fro granted that it was his to direct, hers to be guided”

Edmund Widdowson’s love of Monica is jealous, obsessive and suffocating, and Monica is soon regretting her hasty marriage. Her dissatisfaction is increased when she and her husband meet young Mr Bevis and his mother and sisters while on holiday. They continue their acquaintance when home in London.
When Mary Barfoot’s disgraced cousin Everard arrives on the scene – he is immediately drawn to Rhoda, initially he is interested to see if he can turn her head, her apparent dislike of romance and marriage represents a challenge to Everard.

In The Odd women Gissing takes as his themes: marriage, morals, and women’s roles in Victorian society and the beginnings of the early feminist movement. It is an enormously readable and engaging novel, although Gissing’s world is not a cosy one. Many of the characters are flawed, angry or cynical – but they are fully rounded and wholly believable. Gissing writes about poverty, disillusion, alcoholism, obsession and Victorian society in grimy foggy London streets, yet he makes it palatable and gripping. It is many years since I read any George Gissing novels – I think I read three or four way back when – and I am now wondering why I left it so long to re-visit his work.