The overt subject, the training of unmarried women for employment so as to allow them to support themselves, leads to questioning of marriage as supposedly the object of every woman’s life. This involves the question of how women generally should be educated. This leads to scrutiny of the nature and abilities of women. This bumps up against class: does social class determine two categories of women: feminine women and inferior or working-class women preoccupied with sexuality? The construction of gender depends on social class which involves the acceptance of gross inequity. That does not seem right. In the end the maze does not offer a path to a solution. It figures the fact that what purports to deal with ‘Spinsterdom’ (a twentieth-century translation of the title of The Odd Women) includes everyone, male and female, whatever class they claim to belong to. The impasse reflects not stasis but turbulence out of which change can result.

The site of contestation, the vortex of the whirlpool, is the institution of marriage. This was much criticized and in the 1890s the criticism found expression in literary as well as discursive writing: in fiction such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and the Keynotes stories (1893) of ‘George Egerton’ (Mary Chavelita Dunne). There were various aspects of marriage which caused dissent. Access to divorce was very restricted, particularly for women: a husband need only prove adultery as grounds, a wife had to show not only adultery but an aggravating cause such as violence, incest, bestiality, sodomy, or desertion. This is why, for instance, in Hardy’s The Woodlanders, Grace cannot divorce her unfaithful husband, Fitzpiers. The situation improved only marginally in 1884 with an easing of the interpretation of desertion. In addition custody rights were the father’s prerogative: only in 1873 did it become a possibility for the mother to have custody of children up to the age of 16, and then only in restricted circumstances. Not until 1882 was a married woman able (except by means of an elaborate and expensive pre-marital legal settlement) to hold her own property or to keep what she earned after the marriage.

Legally, the position at the time when The Odd Woman was published in 1893 had moved only a short way beyond Blackstone’s much quoted mantra in his Commentaries (1765–9): ‘By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law: that is the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage or at least incorporated into that of the husband.’13 Even in social terms divorce was still not generally acceptable among the respectable middle class, though the upper reaches of society showed their usual tolerance of their own sexual mores. For all this, the mid-Victorian ideal of marriage did not collapse like a balloon when prodded in one spot by its critics. Its ramifications as an ideological construct were as usual not immediately discerned or discernible even by hostile critics. A trivial illustration from recent history of the kind of difficulty involved would be in the interpretation of the significance of the production of cripplingly dangerous stiletto shoes for women. Were they the equivalent of the Chinese practice of binding women’s feet, one more choice for women, or does it depend on the motives of the wearer? So it was not the ramifications but the central aspects of the institution of marriage that were attacked in the late nineteenth century as undesirable. Mainly this meant the difficulty of escaping from a failed marriage and the destructive and distorting constraints it imposed on women.

Failed marriages abound in The Odd Women, several of them described by Barfoot and as marginal to the narrative as those sketchily observed in Jude the Obscure. Their very marginality underlines the critique they offer, since they have no function other than to illustrate the way that many marriages founder on the wife’s defects. They include the marriage of Everard’s brother Thomas to a hysterical woman who selfishly abandons her dying husband; Mrs Orchard who so torments her husband by her stupidity and triviality that he can only avoid suicide by abandoning her and their children; and Mrs Poppleton whose dullness and dimwittedness drive her husband into a ‘lunatic asylum’. At the same time the idyllic marriage of the Micklethwaites shows the difficulty even for Barfoot in discarding the idea of the model wife as a silent self-sacrificing housekeeper and cook. He even concludes that the Ruskinian ideal still has validity. Ruskin asserted in his essay ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ (1865), in a supposed eulogy, that he sees woman’s ‘true place and power’ in the home: ‘So far as she rules, all must be right or nothing is. She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good, instinctively, infallibly wise—wise not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband but that she may never fail from his side…’ She must be infinitely flexible to provide ‘infinitely applicable, modesty of service’.14 Barfoot sees this as ‘Not his ideal; but very beautiful amid the vulgarities and vileness of ordinary experience. It was the old fashion in its purest presentment: the consecrated form of domestic happiness, removed beyond reach of satire, only to be touched, if touched at all, with the very gentlest irony’ (p. 197). If Everard were to be equated with the author’s views the predominantly critical account of his friends’ marriages would be the dominant reading of the institution in the text. Some of his ideas do echo those in Gissing’s letter, but it is the Widdowsons’ marriage which takes the central place in the narrative both structurally and through its gripping detail.