As did most novels by George Gissing, The Odd Women focused on working-class poor in an uncaring society. The novel opens with six happy sisters, living with their widower physician father. He believes that women should not have to worry about finances and counsels his daughter Alice, “I should grieve indeed if I thought my girls would ever have to distress themselves about money.” Shortly, he dies in an accident, never acting on his plans to purchase life insurance. Suddenly, the daughters must focus on money, or the lack thereof. While the atmosphere of their home had been “intellectual,” and they had studied partly at school, “it never occurred to Dr. Madden that his daughters would do well to study with a professional object.” Thus, they have few skills. Few family members exist to offer help, and among their friends, including Rhoda Nunn, none can care for six young women.

Sixteen years later, in the spring of 1888, two of the sisters have died, leaving four to fend for themselves. At 33, Virginia is unhealthy, but not as unhealthy as her older sister Alice, corpulent and prone to headaches. Isabel, at 22, is so plain that she would never attract a suitor. She develops a melancholia that advances into brain fever and drowns herself in a bathtub. Only Monica, the youngest of the group, seems to have a chance at happiness, although her job working long hours in a store threatens her health. The two older sisters move in together when both lose their jobs—Virginia as a lady’s companion and Alice as a governess in a demanding household where she earned little. Gissing emphasizes the limited choices available to such women.

When Virginia and Alice meet again with their friend Rhoda Nunn, she speaks of the “half a million more women than men” in their “happy country” who constitute “odd women—no making a pair with them. The pessimists call them useless, lost, futile lives.” Rhoda refuses to join that camp, however, viewing women with some education as a resource, a “reserve” to be trained. Teaming with a Miss Barfoot, she teaches women to type and earn a living. While it is too late for Alice or Virginia, they push Monica to join Miss Barfoot’s training program.

Gissing does not give readers much hope for this sad group. Monica will meet and marry Edmund Widdowson, who can easily support her, but he is much older than she, and she marries him from semi-desperation. Virginia and Alice descend deeper into their own desperate attempts to keep up the charade of respectability, but their loneliness remains acute, and Virginia becomes addicted to gin. Monica eventually has an affair with a man called Bevis and leaves Edmund, giving birth to a daughter and then dying.

Rhoda Nunn enjoys an ill-fated passion for Miss Barfoot’s cousin, Everard. She proves of too strong a character for him, refusing to bend to his will. As she wonders how she might destroy her love for him, she considers taking poison. However, she recovers her good sense, understanding that such an act would “feed his vanity” and “give him the lifelong reflection that, for love of him, a woman excelled by few in qualities of brain and heart, had died like a rat.”

Early in the novel, Monica thinks of her sisters: “Their loneliness was for life [. . .] they would grow older, sadder, perpetually struggling to supplement that dividend from the precious capital—merely that they might keep alive. Oh! . . . how much better if the poor girls had never been born.” Yet Gissing does not seem to support that bleak a view. Through Rhoda Nunn, he offers a feminist figure that finds value in work. While the ideal would allow her to note value in herself as an individual, that would prove unrealistic in her era. Instead, she has her freedom, whether as a simple product of rationalizing her situation or as a true commodity. In the end, it proves more valuable than the false love that led to Monica’s demise and that which had threatened Rhoda’s own well-being. In realizing her intellectual superiority to Everard, she can live with the knowledge that he chose to marry a socialite. She exclaims to Virginia at the book’s conclusion that her work training women to be productive members of society flourishes “like the green bay-tree.” She and Miss Barfoot plan to expand to bigger premises and free even more women because “The world is moving!”

But Gissing concludes with a caution that while signs of progress exist, much needs to be done. When Virginia goes into the house, leaving Rhoda to hold Monica’s baby, Rhoda looks into the child’s sleeping face. Both her literal and figurative vision grow “dim,” as she murmurs, “‘Poor little child!’”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Colon, Susan. “Professionalism and Domesticity in George Gissing’s The Odd Women.” English Literature in Translation: 1880–1920 44, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 441–59.

Comitini, Patricia. “A Feminist Fantasy: Conflicting Ideologies in The Odd Women.” Studies in the Novel 27, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 529–543.

Michaux, Jean Pierre, ed. George Gissing: Critical Essays. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1981.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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