- Paperback: 416 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Classics; New Ed edition (30 Jun 1994)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140433791
- ISBN-13: 978-0140433791
- Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 13 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 114,954 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Stephen Arata, University of Virginia
"In Arlene Young’s carefully edited and annotated edition, we have the definitive guide to Gissing’s novel."
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
Virginia and Alice Madden are 'odd women', growing old alone in Victorian England with no prospect of finding love. Forced into poverty by the sudden death of their father, they lead lives of quiet desperation in a genteel boarding house in London. Meanwhile, their younger sister Monica, struggles to endure a loveless marriage she agreed to as her only escape from spinsterhood. But when the Maddens meet an old friend, Rhoda Nunn, they are soon made aware of the depth of their oppression. Astonishingly ahead of its time, The Odd Women is a pioneering work of early feminism. Gissing's depiction of the daring feminist Rhoda Nunn, it is an unflinching portrayal of one woman's struggle to reconcile her own desires with her deepest principles.
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First Sentence
"So to-morrow, Alice," said Dr. Madden, as he walked with his eldest daughter on the coast-downs by Clevedon, "I shall take steps for insuring my life for a thousand pounds." Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
"So to-morrow, Alice," said Dr. Madden, as he walked with his eldest daughter on the coast-downs by Clevedon, "I shall take steps for insuring my life for a thousand pounds." Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book should be forcefed to Bridget Jones and her ilk to remind them how indulgent their sappy concerns really are. Gissing skilfully and sympathetically creates a cast of single women, all facing different dilemmas as the Victorian age draws to a close and voices demanding female suffrage are making themselves heard. Rhoda Nunn is passionately committed to her work providing employment for supposedly "unmarriageable" women, but when an independently wealthy playboy decides to see if he can make her fall in love with him, she must re-examine everything she believes in. For Monica Madden, 18, attractive, but with only a tiny capital forcing her to live in near poverty, marriage to the staid and conventional Edmund Widdowson seems like a solution to all the problems of her life. She must however face up to the realities of Victorian marriage to a man she barely knows. Around them, their friends and families flesh out an impressively plausible late Victorian world, in a society poised on the edge of creating the world we live in today. Gissing writes great dialogue, and bar a slightly melodramatic incident on which both strands of the plot pivot, presents scene after scene of involving conflict and hard decisions. New Grub Street, by the same author, is also great, but this feels somehow more relevant to today's concerns. Though prepare yourself for the shift in the character's presumptions - and feel fortunate indeed that so much has changed for the better.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
George Gissing had a very interesting life as the introduction shows. In this novel he shows how unhappy and unproductive life can be for those so-called 'odd women who have to work to keep themselves and for whom marriage is unlikely. The novel centres around the Madden sisters who, after the untimely death of their father are forced to keep themselves and bring up their younger siblings. There are very few such ways open to women in Victorian society and the sisters lead a miserable existence when they renew acquaintanceship with a former friend, Rhoda Nunn. Miss Nunn and her friend Mary Barfoot run a training scheme to help single women earn a living through secretarial and other office work. As the story progresses, we see how the youngest and prettiest Madden sister , unhappy with working in slave-like conditions in a drapers shop ,first joins the training scheme but then eschews it for a loveless marriage to a much older man of means. Gissing uses this scenario to compare and contrast the lives of Rhoda Nunn who is happy in her work and loveless celibacy and Monica Madden whose intellectual awakening after her marriage causes her to question the whole area of marriage and womens rights. It is a brilliant and absorbing story.
11 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It's unfortunate that books such as Gissing's are among the few reissued from the 1890s given the huge numbers of fictional works by the feminist, so-called "New Women" writers of that period. Writers such as Mona Caird, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Grand, Iota et al not only deal with the same kind of territory as Gissing, but they also worked politically in both suffrage and other feminist organisations to effect change for women. Gissing, on the other hand, was quite anti-feminist in his political writings and his letters. Other novels of his bear no relation to the themes he discusses here. Prominent feminists of the late nineteenth-century, such as Millicent Garrett Fawcett, dismissed Gissing as a bandwagon-jumper, more interested in penning a best-seller - and adapting his material to suit the market of the period - than in feminist aims. Having read this novel, I see it more as a symptom of the backlash against feminist aims in the 1890s, a little like Henry James' _The Bostonians_ than as a novel which exemplifies the best of the New Woman novel. For women such as Garrett Fawcett, the fact that this novel has endured, would be comparable to writers in the next century seeing the film _Basic Instinct_ as a great example of a strong career woman in the twentieth century. It's great to see other novels like Sarah Grand's _The Heavenly Twins_ being reprinted, but what about the novels of all the other women of the 1890s which would make a great contribution to our understanding of late nineteenth century women, and also the way their novels were ignored in the intervening century because of the aftermath of the Wilde trials.
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