She thinks that to give Bella a second chance would be ‘anti-social’. Mary in return plainly regards this term as trendy jargon transforming the meaning of the word from ‘averse to company’ to ‘hostile to society’s values’, ‘criminal’: ‘A favourite word on your lips just now…Why is it anti-social?’ Monica objects to her husband’s vocabulary in response to his explanation that men and women ‘are made for entirely different duties’ as she exclaims ‘Oh, that word Duty’ (p. 183) and ‘Why should you say allow? Do you think of me as your servant?’ The anomalous Mrs Cosgrove, with her placidly implacable hostility to marriage in general chooses a name for herself: ‘There are women whose conduct I think personally detestable, and whom yet I can’t help thanking for their assault upon social laws. We shall have to go through a stage of anarchy, you know, before reconstruction begins. Yes, in that sense I am an anarchist’ (p. 315). These remarks, like Barfoot’s, echo the notorious letter of 1893 but are delivered calmly. It is possible to read hers as the perspective from which the anarchic scene is viewed by the narrator: though he does not commit himself to her view, he presents the anarchy as having positive elements.

Gissing’s ideas were pushed further by the feminist Mona Caird in her essay ‘The Morality of Marriage’ (1897): ‘When we have overcome the spirit of jealous exaction, we shall find that our whole moral ideal has undergone a profound modification. A glimpse at the end of the twentieth century might puzzle even those who are most prepared for change.’25 Gissing was not so prescient but he was not unhopeful. Not surprisingly, one contemporary female reviewer wrote: ‘No one who has read this book will ever forget it—no woman at least.’26

NOTE ON THE TEXT

Gissing wrote The Odd Women in the course of 1892 with great difficulty. It was published on 10 April 1893 by Lawrence and Bullen who, in February 1892, had published his novel Denzil Quarrier. These were publishers who, as he told his friend Eduard Bertz in a letter dated 16 February 1892, had behaved ‘generously’ over that novel. Consequently he was pleased that they had asked for ‘a chance of publishing my next book’. His account of the new novel in the same letter does not describe the novel in the form in which it was finally published:

The book I now have in mind is to deal with the great question of ‘throwing pearls before swine’. It will present those people who, congenitally incapable of true education, have yet been taught to consider themselves too good for manual or any humble, work. As yet I have chiefly dealt with types expressing the struggle of natures above their stations; now I turn to those who are below it. The story will be a study of vulgarism—the all but triumphant force of our time. Women will be the chief characters.1

This simplistic account is not an accurate template for The Odd Women—apart from its final sentence.

Presumably that complex and multi-faceted narrative developed through the ten or so false starts that Gissing records in his Diary. According to Michael Collie, Gissing’s later statement that he wrote the novel between 18 August and 4 October shows, as do his comments on his other works, that when he says that he wrote a work in a set period ‘he refers, not to the total time during which he was in some sense working on the book, but rather to the intense, final but much shorter period in which he produced the version of the novel actually submitted to the publisher’.2

Certainly the Diary records a wretched period for Gissing both domestically and in terms of work: ‘Laboured at my first pages’; ‘Have abandoned novel again’; ‘worked out a few ideas’; ‘wrote 1p., but half-heartedly’3 etc. However, by 30 August he wrote to Bertz: ‘My slow work has brought me nearly to the end of Vol I of a new book. It deals with the women who, from the marriage point of view, are superfluous. “The Odd Women,” I shall perhaps call it.’4 And on 4 October he wrote in his diary:

Wrote 5 pp., & then finished the last chapter. Shall call the book ‘The Odd Women’—I have written it very quickly, but the writing has been as severe a struggle as I ever knew. Not a day without wrangling and uproar down in the kitchen; not an hour when I was really at peace of mind. A bitter struggle.5

But the publisher A. H. Bullen to whom he sent the text responded warmly: ‘I have read “The Odd Women”, and think that it will sustain or even enhance your reputation. In fact I am inclined to agree with you that it is your best book.’6 Bullen suggested some changes but, since the whereabouts of the manuscript are unknown, it is not possible to see how many Gissing made. The first edition was, as usual at the time, in three volumes and the second (1894) in one. There are about twenty minor differences between the two editions, mainly corrections to misprints.