The Odd Women (Oxford World's Classics)

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Editorial matter © Patricia Ingham 2000
Chronology © Stephen Gill 1992

First published as an Oxford World’s Classic paperback 2000

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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

GEORGE GISSING

The Odd Women

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
PATRICIA INGHAM

OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

THE ODD WOMEN

GEORGE GISSING was born in Wakefield in 1857. His promising academic career was cut short when, in 1876, he was dismissed from Owens College, Manchester, after stealing money in order to help the prostitute, Nell Harrison, start a new life. After a month’s hard labour and a year in the United States, he returned to England, married Nell, and began a life of constant literary activity. The early years were spent in poverty and domestic discord; his wife died in 1888. A series of novels, beginning with Workers in the Dawn (1880) and culminating in The Nether World (1889) attracted some notice, but financial security continued to elude him. It was not until 1891, with the publication of New Grub Street, that Gissing was acknowledged as a major writer. In the same year he married for a second time, no less disastrously than before. Many novels followed, notably Born in Exile (1892), The Odd Women (1893), In the Year of Jubilee (1894) and The Crown of Life (1899): the dominant note was one of dour pessimism. Gissing moved to France in 1899 to live with Gabrielle Fleury. Widespread acclaim greeted The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft in 1903, but at the end of that year Gissing died.

PATRICIA INGHAM is a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. Her publications include Thomas Hardy: A Feminist Reading (1989), Dickens, Women and Language (1992), and The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel (1996). She has also edited Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, The Woodlanders, and The Well-Beloved.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Note on the Text

Select Bibliography

A Chronology of George Gissing

Map: The London of The Odd Women

THE ODD WOMEN

Explanatory Notes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank Jenny Harrington and Shannon Russell for their help in preparing this edition; and also the staff of St Anne’s College library.

INTRODUCTION

The title of George Gissing’s novel The Odd Women (1893) is in its way as provocative as the subtitle ‘A Pure Woman’ that Hardy added belatedly to Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). It is a play on the then fashionable topic of the New Woman which enjoyed its heyday in the first half of the 1890s. In using it Gissing is alluding to W. R. Greg’s famous article ‘Why are Women Redundant?’ in The National Review1 in which women are seen as redundant because at a marriageable age their numbers exceed those of their male counterparts. He sees the ‘cure’ as emigration and an acceptance of the poverty that marriage may bring to less wealthy couples. As Rhoda Nunn explains the bad news to Monica Madden, ‘there are half a million more women than men in this unhappy country of ours… So many odd women—no making a pair with them. The pessimists call them useless, lost, futile lives’ (p. 44). New Woman novels challenged the belief that unmarried women were ‘lost’ lives (using an adjective often applied to prostitutes) by showing in a romantic fashion that women really only found their full identity outside the constraints of contemporary marriage. In such novels as Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Yellow Aster by ‘Iota’ (1894) the heroines strike grand attitudes while rejecting marriage before or after the event.