A single life, it is asserted, is a choice, the best choice, not an imposition (though that only seems to be true if a marriage is on offer). Usually, however, as in these two texts, the women either submit to a husband or the fictional alternative—death.

Gissing satirizes these romantic accounts of the New Woman by changing the epithet. In doing so he takes up Greg’s conventional perception of unmarried women as superfluous because ‘unpaired’ and makes the point that this involves seeing them as ‘odd’ in the more common sense of ‘abnormal, eccentric’. They are generally viewed as marginal not just numerically but in relation to the ideal of womanhood. The change from singular to plural in the noun ‘woman’ is a challenge to the idea of a unitary ‘woman’ that is pushed further by the wide range of individual women who people his narrative. In addition to Mary Barfoot, whose aim is to make unmarried women self-supporting, and Rhoda Nunn, who is against marriage on principle because it involves inequality between husband and wife, there are many other unstereotypical female characters. Monica Widdowson (née Madden) marries out of poverty into unexpectedly painful comfort and tries fiercely to escape her pathologically jealous husband. Her attempt at a New Woman elopement of the romantic sort fails dismally when Bevis, the lover, loses his nerve. One of her (unmarried) sisters commits suicide, another, Alice, takes to religiosity, and a third, Virginia, becomes an alcoholic. Around these central figures cluster others who reject matrimony—including the vestal virgin, Mildred Vesper, a natural celibate; Mrs Cosgrove, who ‘though in the general belief her marriage had been a happy one’ holds views ‘on the matrimonial relation of singular audacity’; and a group referred to by the narrator as a ‘not unimportant type of the odd women’—prostitutes (p. 331).

The New Woman novel was a short-lived species of the fantasy genre in fiction which, by adopting a conventionally romantic form, largely vitiated its own effectiveness in furthering women’s causes. It could even be turned to cynical purposes by the male author, Grant Allen, who in The Woman Who Did created a universally acceptable bestseller. His title reveals where his emphasis lay: not on the woman who did not marry but on the woman who did cohabit with a lover in a free union. It brought him an income which Gissing conspicuously envied. Gissing’s variation on this form of novel is far more significant. Although its title suggests a narrow range of unexciting material, this is misleading. So too is any interpretation of it which deals with it in the purely biographical terms of much Gissing criticism. It is easy to see why such criticism abounds. Gissing’s life has all the ingredients for a melodrama. Having been born in 1857 to a pharmacist in modest circumstances, he managed to become a student at Owens College, Manchester. His university career ended when in 1876 he received a prison sentence for stealing money from the cloakroom there to support the young prostitute Nell Harrison with whom he was living. His later marriage to her was a disaster because of her alcoholism. But after Nell’s death he married another working-class woman and this too proved unsuccessful, apparently because of Edith’s instability and violence. Finally, because he was refused a divorce, he set up house with Gabrielle Fleury in France where he died. Most of his life was spent in poverty as he struggled to earn a living as a writer while living with first Nell and then Edith. As Edith found it impossible to look after the older of their two sons, he was brought up by Gissing’s siblings.

The novel, however, is best illuminated by showing how it engages with all the major social and sexual issues that were fiercely debated as the nineteenth century approached its close. The debates were fuelled, as in other centuries, by the sense of dissolution that accompanied the century’s end. The period was often seen as anarchic in predictable Armageddon scenarios. Certainly there was a measure of social anarchy, but some took a less gloomy view of it than this. Any biographical references, any echoes of Gissing’s own life, letters, or diary, merely give specificity to an enactment of the intellectual uncertainty and conflicts of the time for a man born into his circumstances, which shaped him as well as his text.

Gissing’s most obvious change in the genre was simple.