The first is that in a novel thick with financial calculations its practicalities are never disclosed. Rhoda and Everard examine the subject in a vacuum. With a platonic loftiness they talk only in terms of perfection, of intellectual compatibility, of affinity. Everard is to an extent hypocritical but Rhoda too, unlike Monica, is in the end cold and more interested in power and self-esteem than love. It is a discussion that belongs in the fantasy world of the New Woman novels where the mundanities cease to exist. The material realities are obsessively logged as to food, clothes, use of omnibuses, trains; there is no similar account of the lives of free unioners, though villas in Italy would seem appropriate. There is no thought of the woman’s status in society (as in Anna Karenina), the effect on children’s prospects of being illegitimate, what is to happen to the woman and possibly children if the relationship breaks down. Such remoteness from the reality of the world of this particular narrative transforms free union into a fantasy. This is confirmed by the other noticeable feature of its treatment: the outcome. The prospect of a free union between Rhoda and Everard ironically founders over the very issue it is supposed to avoid: the question of dominance in the power relation. Both parties seek such power, although the ‘freedom’ referred to is supposed to involve equality of the sexes as well as the ability to call it a day. This is the final impasse.

Surprisingly perhaps, given its complexity, the novel was recognized by contemporary reviewers as outstanding: ‘a genuine work of art, remarkable among the novels of the day’;20 ‘his book represents the Woman question made flesh… the most interesting novel of the year’;21 ‘it is better written than anything which Mr. Gissing had previously published’.22 It is Gissing’s detachment which allows him to show the female characters in all their complexity that reviewers praise. The work is not seen as in any way dauntingly didactic:

It would have been a real calamity if Mr Gissing had tried to palm off on us under the guise of a novel, a treatise … on the Woman question. To an active mind like his, profoundly interested in the phenomena of the civilization round him, the danger must have been great. None the less, he has kept his story very free from sociological dialectic.

Gissing is seen by this reviewer as equal with Zola and Ibsen in treating ‘the widest and loosest ideas … in a purely artistic way’.23 There was a consensus that the novel was ‘intensely modern’,24 which is perhaps why the issues it raises are still the subject of contemporary debate.

Thus The Odd Women occludes a purely biographical reading. Gissing’s views on all these issues as expressed in his letters and diary are confronted by opposing perspectives. There is seen to be some truth in both, some sympathy with each. There is also a recognition of how inextricably the issues entwine. The text presents a powerfully claustrophobic picture and yet it is one from which the narrator detaches himself from what he sees as an energetically anarchic scene. Both the narrator and the characters reveal a certain stepping back from the contemporary chaos by a questioning of the significance of the language used to speak of gender and class. Key terms in these discourses are picked up and briefly scrutinized as from a meta-level. The conflicts become linguistic as much as social. In the passage already quoted, the narrator, when explaining the phrase ‘really nice people’ as the middle class, contrasts them with those tainted by the ‘miasma of democracy’. The emancipated women squabble over whether to describe the non-middle-classes as ‘poorer’, ‘uneducated’, or ‘lower’. In her lecture on ‘Woman as an Invader’ in the workplace Mary Barfoot is dismissive of ‘the charming language of Mr Ruskin’ and says ‘I want to do away with that common confusion of the words womanly and womanish’ which has resulted in the latter becoming ‘practically synonymous with the former. A womanly occupation means … an occupation that a man disdains’ (p. 152). Rhoda rebukes the absence of radicalism in Mary’s remark that the seduced Bella Royston ‘fell in love’ with the tart response, ‘for what isn’t that phrase responsible’ (p. 66).