The settings of the New Woman novels are as exotic as the heroines’ names. Evadne in The Heavenly Twins (1893), Hadria in The Daughters of Danaus (1894), Gallia in the novel of that name (1895), and Herminia in Grant Allen’s bestseller all inhabit an upper-class world with no more interest in money than that of a fairy-tale. Hadria, for instance, leaves her husband and children to fulfil herself by studying music in Paris; Herminia who will not marry on principle is taken away by her lover and would-be husband to a villa in Italy. She is impoverished in a general way after his death but supports herself and her daughter by work as a journalist.

By contrast, in The Odd Women the setting is a detailed grimy, fogridden London. There the penniless Virginia Madden walks the five miles across the city to visit Rhoda Nunn in Chelsea to save the omnibus fare. She walks to ‘Battersea Park, over Chelsea Bridge, then the weary stretch to Victoria Station, and the upward labour to Charing Cross’ (p. 22). The laborious itinerary is repeated by other journeys which enact the dreariness of travel for the poor. Everything in this represented world has to be paid for in cash and comes with a price tag.2 Incomes are scrutinized as though by a credit agency: there is hardly a character whose income is not specified. Widdowson inherits a legacy of £600 a year which raises him from work as a clerk to gentlemanly idleness. This provides him with a semi-detached ‘villa’ at Herne Hill run by a housekeeper and one other servant. Everard Barfoot, born into middle-class comfort and a university education, has standards of living which make him equate an unearned income of £450 a year with poverty for a bachelor and ‘grinding poverty’ for a married man (p. 109). This startles his friend Micklethwaite, a struggling mathematics teacher rejoicing in a new post as a lecturer ‘at a London college’ on a salary of £150: But then he has spent seventeen years working his way up to these riches from an annual income of £35.

Apart from Mary Barfoot, who has ‘private means—not large, but sufficient’ to run a school ‘to train young girls for work in offices’ (p. 27), and her co-worker Rhoda Nunn who is self-supporting, the central female figures have a lower scale of financial values. Dr Madden leaves a legacy of £800 in total to his six unmarried daughters which, even by Micklethwaite’s standards, means only short-term provision. The three daughters who survive after sixteen years subsist on annual salaries ranging from Alice’s £16 as a ‘nursery governess’ and Virginia’s £12 as ‘a companion’, to Monica’s pittance as a living-in shop assistant, working a six-day week of thirteen to sixteen hours a day. When forced temporarily to live on their savings, Alice and Virginia find they have only £17 in hand. This, they calculate, must provide for a likely six months at least of unemployment. Alice takes an optimistic view: ‘“If it came to the very worst, our food need not cost more than sixpence a day—three and sixpence a week. I really do believe, Virgie, we could support life on less—say, on fourpence. Yes, we could, dear!”’ (p. 19). Gissing, who had spent his early years in London in food-obsessed poverty, translates money into food of a kind he hopefully described to his brother Algernon as sustaining and nutritious. Meals such as his own are specified in the sisters’ diet of ‘plain rice… with a little butter, pepper, and salt’ or ‘mashed potato and milk’ (pp. 17, 25). A birthday feast that they provide for Monica (but manage not to share) consists of specifically small delicacies: a ‘tiny’ piece of salmon, a ‘dainty’ cutlet, and ‘a cold black-currant tart’ (p. 40).

Similarly, all material surroundings involve the question of cost, a constant preoccupation in Gissing’s correspondence with his brother. The Madden sisters themselves tacitly ask the question ‘How much does it cost?’ when moving into Mary Barfoot’s more luxurious setting. So too does Monica when picked up by Edmund Widdowson on a park bench.