The Odd Women (Annotated)
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- This edition includes the following analysis by the editor in the form of a conclusion: "The Odd Women," a pioneering novel of women's emancipation
Originally published in 1893, “The Odd Women” is a Victorian novel by English novelist George Gissing and it is considered one of his most popular novels. Its themes are the role of women in society, marriage, morals and the early feminist movement. Critics praise Gissing for sensitively tackling gender issues and Victorian sexuality but, for a Victorian novel, it was a very provocative work.
“The Odd Women” follows two women who must forge independent lives for themselves when they fail to find husbands.
The novel tells the story of the Madden sisters, Alicia, Virginia and Monica. Their father’s death leaves them in poverty and forces them to seek ways to support themselves – this at a time when career options for genteel women were close to nonexistent. The two elder sisters find work as governesses or lady’s companions and just barely manage to make ends meet, living lives of respectable poverty and quiet starvation. In addition to this, the fact that they have to work has of course social consequences, one of them being that it bars them from the career followed by most Victorian women: marriage. Monica, the youngest of the Misses Madden, works as a shopgirl, and her youth and beauty make Alicia and Virginia hope that she’ll escape becoming one of the odd women the title refers to – “odd” both because as single women they were regarded as strange, and because they remained unpaired...
George Gissing
George Gissing (1857-1903) was an English novelist. Born in Yorkshire, he excelled as a student from a young age, earning a scholarship to Owens College where he won prizes for his poetry and academic writing. Expelled and arrested for a series of thefts in 1876, Gissing was forced to leave England for the United States, teaching classics and working as a short story writer in Massachusetts and Chicago. The following year, he returned to England and embarked on a career as a professional novelist, publishing works of naturalism inspired by his experience of poverty and the works of Charles Dickens. After going through an acrimonious divorce, Gissing remarried in 1891 and entered a turbulent relationship with Edith Alice Underwood, with whom he raised two children before separating in 1897. During this time, after writing several unpublished novels, Gissing found success with New Grub Street (1891), Born in Exile (1892), and The Odd Women (1893). In the last years of his life, Gissing befriended H.G. Wells and travelled throughout Italy, Germany, and France, where he died after falling ill during a winter walk.
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