This is not a marriage which fails (or rather becomes a horror) because of Monica’s deficiencies, though these exist, but because of her husband’s weakness and the scope for tyranny towards a woman financially dependent on him that the contemporary institution offers. Earlier woman writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell, and Geraldine Jewsbury had figured such marriages as being ‘buried alive’15 or ‘entombed’. This image is elaborated in Zolaesque detail from Monica’s point of view. She is immured with and totally dependent on an obsessively jealous man who wishes, he says, literally to keep her to himself. He wants to control not only whom she may meet but what she may read and the words she may use. The claustrophobic entrapment, heated by pathological jealousy, is matched but not outdone by the story of Louis Trevelyan and his wife in Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right (1869). In both texts the grubby private detectives whom the men employ to spy on their wives figure the husbands’ own role in their marriages as gaolers and spies. Widdowson’s commands to Monica echo the edicts of Blackstone: ‘the natural law that points out a woman’s place… commands her to follow her husband’s guidance’ (p. 184); ‘a married woman must accept her husband’s opinion’ (p. 223); ‘I have been absurdly weak, and weakness in the husband means unhappiness in the wife.… I am no tyrant, but I shall rule you for your own good’ (p. 250). Monica is apparently middle class but she is by no means the exceptional woman of whom Everard dreams ‘with man’s capability of understanding and reasoning; free from superstition, religious or social’ (p. 197). Monica is a nonentity and it is that which makes the sympathetic account of her struggle to be free significant. She is oppressed but she is calculating. In the sense that she is not a Rhoda Nunn or a Mary Barfoot this is a plea for ‘the solidarity of women’ for escape from being buried alive for run-of-the-mill women. Monica’s torments are given the intensity that might belong to a more heroic figure: ‘Every day the distance between them widened, and when he took her in his arms she had to struggle with a sense of shrinking, of disgust. The union was unnatural; she felt herself constrained by a hateful force when he called upon her for the show of wifely tenderness’ (p. 223). The passage is echoed by the feminist ‘George Egerton’ when she writes of ‘the nightly degradation, the hateful yoke’.16 From Gissing this is unexpected on a biographical reading: the agonies of marriage in his letters are all those of a disappointed and disgusted husband. The comparison reveals an important contrast between his letters and this most detached of all his novels. This detachment, for instance, allowed his contemporary critics to read it in contradictory ways. One is disapprovingly sure that ‘the drift of his conclusions on sexual relations is in favour of union libre’,17 another asserts that ‘It is not easy to see how far the doctrine of terminable marriages and “marriages in the the sight of God”… are really Mr. Gissing’s own and how far they are attributable to his characters’.18

The critique of marriage from the masculine point of view led naturally to the question of what alternative there might be. Easier divorce was just a beginning and was sometimes called for by men in the 1890s. Hardy, for instance, stated later that in 1895 he had believed that ‘a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties’.19 He claimed not to know of a better alternative to legal marriage. The most provocative suggestion was to make ‘free union’ or cohabitation the acceptable norm. This is Everard’s position since he ceased to ‘believe in’ marriage. It is free union that at first he offers to Rhoda and she refuses. Later he offers marriage and she rejects that.

Two features of Gissing’s treatment of free union are striking.