The Odd Women
When their father’s death leaves them with no money and a dim future, the Madden sisters, Alice, Virginia, and Monica, must negotiate the gender roles and class constraints of Victorian London in the 1890s. Virginia and Alice have aged out of the possibility of marriage and seemingly the idea of love itself and find themselves with few prospects and little hope. Remaindered in the marriage equation, these “odd women” face a great deal of scrutiny, stigma, and social pressure—it’s at this time that Rhoda Nunn, childhood friend to the Madden sisters, arrives in London to challenge accepted norms and mores around the role of women in society. Rhoda’s strong feminist passion draws a sharp contrast to the middle-class respectability of the Madden sisters’ upbring, as the sisters watch a new world emerge around them. 

Hailed as a prescient and boldly political novel of the early feminist movement, Gissing’s The Odd Women captures all of the absurdity, brutality, and even comedy of Victorian attitudes around gender and class, and the brilliant women who dared to be odd and to conceive of their role in society beyond their value on the marriage market.

1116670493
The Odd Women
When their father’s death leaves them with no money and a dim future, the Madden sisters, Alice, Virginia, and Monica, must negotiate the gender roles and class constraints of Victorian London in the 1890s. Virginia and Alice have aged out of the possibility of marriage and seemingly the idea of love itself and find themselves with few prospects and little hope. Remaindered in the marriage equation, these “odd women” face a great deal of scrutiny, stigma, and social pressure—it’s at this time that Rhoda Nunn, childhood friend to the Madden sisters, arrives in London to challenge accepted norms and mores around the role of women in society. Rhoda’s strong feminist passion draws a sharp contrast to the middle-class respectability of the Madden sisters’ upbring, as the sisters watch a new world emerge around them. 

Hailed as a prescient and boldly political novel of the early feminist movement, Gissing’s The Odd Women captures all of the absurdity, brutality, and even comedy of Victorian attitudes around gender and class, and the brilliant women who dared to be odd and to conceive of their role in society beyond their value on the marriage market.

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The Odd Women

The Odd Women

Overview

When their father’s death leaves them with no money and a dim future, the Madden sisters, Alice, Virginia, and Monica, must negotiate the gender roles and class constraints of Victorian London in the 1890s. Virginia and Alice have aged out of the possibility of marriage and seemingly the idea of love itself and find themselves with few prospects and little hope. Remaindered in the marriage equation, these “odd women” face a great deal of scrutiny, stigma, and social pressure—it’s at this time that Rhoda Nunn, childhood friend to the Madden sisters, arrives in London to challenge accepted norms and mores around the role of women in society. Rhoda’s strong feminist passion draws a sharp contrast to the middle-class respectability of the Madden sisters’ upbring, as the sisters watch a new world emerge around them. 

Hailed as a prescient and boldly political novel of the early feminist movement, Gissing’s The Odd Women captures all of the absurdity, brutality, and even comedy of Victorian attitudes around gender and class, and the brilliant women who dared to be odd and to conceive of their role in society beyond their value on the marriage market.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781961884243
Publisher: The Unnamed Press
Publication date: 11/26/2024
Series: Smith & Taylor Classics , #2
Edition description: 2nd ed.
Pages: 298
Sales rank: 685,614
Product dimensions: 5.00(w) x 7.75(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

George Gissing (1857-1903) was an English novelist, who published twenty-three novels between 1880 and 1903. Meagrely successful in his lifetime, by the 1940s he had been recognized as a literary genius, with George Orwell pronouncing that "England has produced few better novelists".

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan Universityand a contributing writer at The New Yorker.

Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and The New York Review of Books. He is a Contributing Fiction Editor of the Yale Review and serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. Adam is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University.

Allison Miriam Smith is a co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. She is also an Acquiring Editor and Publishing & Publicity Manager for Unnamed Press. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she was an assistant curator for the USC Doheny Library George Cassady Lewis Carroll Special Collection. She later went on to earn a Masters in 18th & 19th c. Literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, working nights at the library. Before Unnamed Press, she was a bookseller at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, CA.

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is an Acquiring Editor at Unnamed Press and co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
A Note on the Text
George Gissing: A Brief Chronology

The Odd Women

Appendix A: Contemporary Reviews

  1. Glasgow Herald 20 April 1893
  2. Saturday Review 29 April 1893
  3. Athenaeum 27 May 1893
  4. Pall Mall Gazette 29 May 1893
  5. Nation (New York) 13 July 1893
  6. Illustrated London News (Clementia Black) 5 August 1893

Appendix B: Attitudes Towards Women and Marriage in Victorian Culture

  1. Sarah Ellis, from The Daughters of England (1842)
  2. Alfred Lord Tennyson, from The Princess (1847)
  3. Coventry Patmore, from The Angel in the House: “The Rose of the World” (1854)
  4. Thomas Henry Huxley, from “Emancipation—Black and White,” Reader (20 May 1865)
  5. John Ruskin, from “Of Queens’ Gardens,” in Sesame and Lilies (1865)
  6. John Stuart Mill, from The Subjection of Women (1869)
  7. Mona Caird, from “Marriage,” Westminster Review (1888)

Appendix C: Debate over the “Woman Question”

  1. Grant Allen, from “Plain Words on the Woman Question,” Fortnightly Review (October 1889)
  2. Bernard Shaw, from “The Womanly Woman,” The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891)
  3. Eliza Lynn Linton, from “The Wild Women: As Politicians,” Nineteenth Century (July 1891)
  4. Eliza Lynn Linton, from “The Wild Women: As Insurgents,” Nineteenth Century (October 1891)
  5. Mona Caird, “A Defense of the So-Called ‘Wild Women’,” Nineteenth Century (May 1891)
  6. From “Character Note: The New Woman” Cornhill Magazine (October 1894)
  7. Nat Arling, “What is the Role of the ‘New Woman?’” Westminster Review (November 1898)

Appendix D: Women and Paid Employment: The Limitations of Aspirations and the Actualities

  1. Charlotte Brontë, from Shirley (1849)
  2. From “The Disputed Question,” English Woman’s Journal (August 1858)
  3. Evelyn March Phillips, from “The Working Lady in London,” Fortnightly Review (August 1892)
  4. Clara Collet, from “The Employment of Women,” Report to the Royal Commission on Labour (1893)
  5. Frances H. Low, from “How Poor Ladies Live,” Nineteenth Century (March 1897)
  6. Eliza Orme, from “How Poor Ladies Live: A Reply,” Nineteenth Century (April 1897)

Appendix E: Conditions of Work for Men in the White-Collar Sector

  1. James Fitzjames Stephen, from “Gentlemen” Cornhill Magazine (March 1862)
  2. B.O. Orchard, from The Clerks of Liverpool (1871)
  3. Charles Edward Parsons, from Clerks: their Position and Advancement (1876)
  4. Thomas Sutherst, from Death and Disease Behind the Counter (1884)
  5. H.G. Wells, from Kipps (1905)
  6. H.G. Wells, from Experiment in Autobiography (1934)

Appendix F: Map of London (1892)

Selected Bibliography

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