Unnamed Press editors Brandon Taylor and Allison Smith’s just-launched imprint, Smith & Taylor Classicsc, was born from staff meeting conversations that kept leading back to a love of classic literature as well as lesser known 19th-century titles that are classics in their own right. At the end of each book, rather than purely academic introductions, you’ll find lively and wicked-smart conversations between two esteemed readers. Here, Merve Emre and Adam Dalva discuss the complexities of love and marriage in George Gissing’s novel The Odd Women by George Gissing.
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Merve Emre: Henry James’ essay on Gissing begins, “Poor Gissing struck me as quite particularly marked out for what is called in his and my profession an unhappy ending.” I wondered about unhappy endings when I started The Odd Women, which seems determined to mislead and frustrate us from the beginning.
We are introduced to Dr. Madden, who announces to his eldest daughter, Alice, that he intends to insure his life for one thousand pounds tomorrow. Then we are introduced to his other daughters—Virginia, Gertrude, Martha, Isabel, and Monica—and their happy life in the countryside.
We believe we are entering a world that resembles a lesser Austen novel. But by the end of the day, and by the end of the first chapter, Dr. Madden is dead, and the novel has leaped fifteen years into the future, from 1872 to 1887.
Adam Dalva: That false opening is such an interesting gambit. Mark Gibson argues that the beginning is like a mid-Victorian novel. Then, suddenly, we find ourselves in a late Victorian one. Everything that happens in The Odd Women is a consequence of the first chapter. It hangs over the characters for a long time.
ME: The speed with which the mid-Victorian shades into the late Victorian recalls Dr. Madden’s worship of Coleridge and his habit of quoting Tennyson. When he’s walking with Alice, he recites a couplet from “Locksley Hall,” a poem which is spoken by a soldier who looks back on his youthful idealism and his disappointed hopes.
I wondered about unhappy endings when I started The Odd Women, which seems determined to mislead and frustrate us from the beginning.
Dr. Madden speaks these lines abstractly, as if he and his daughters exist at a safe distance from the speaker—as if hunger, poverty, and illness have nothing to do with them.
AD: It dooms his daughters. He doesn’t have a full awareness of their vulnerability or of the suffering of his own late wife. Knowing nothing of The Odd Women going into it, the way that Gissing shorts out his own plot with the surprise of Dr. Madden dying lets the novel get away with how heavy-handed the leap in time might otherwise seem.
I was also shocked to see how Rhoda Nunn, who I feel is the protagonist of this novel, is planted in the first chapter. When she swims up again a bit later, we’re primed for her.
ME: Rhoda Nunn is introduced, I think, to give us the backstory that explains her character. She is in love with Mr. Smithson, whose family she’s staying with and whose children she’s minding while his wife languishes. While we don’t know exactly what has happened between her and Mr. Smithson (if it is an unrequited love, if he led her on), it’s the basis for her militancy and celibacy. True to her name, she will dress and act like a nun.
AD: And we are clued into how all the sisters rely on her in various ways. But I don’t think Rhoda really thinks about the Maddens that much after the beginning. We end up misaligned with our own protagonist, because we’re focused on the sisters for a long time.
ME: We meet Rhoda again in chapter two, “Adrift,” in which we learn that, of the six sisters, three have died. The remaining ones—Virgie, a lady’s companion; Alice, a governess; and Monica, who works in a drapery shop—have come down in the world, from their comfortable country home to the boardinghouses of damp, gloomy gray London.
One day, Virgie receives a letter from Rhoda, who now works at a secretarial school founded by her friend Mary Barfoot. It’s as if the novel begins a second time after allowing itself to drift, or to be adrift.
AD: There’s so much disorientation there. Reading the first chapter, I thought Alice would be our protagonist. She’s the one on the walk with her father. She’s responsible. It takes quite a while for Gissing to reveal that Monica, who, from a young age, is marked as the pretty and marriageable one, is the relevant sister for the plot.
Alice and Virginia are like the droids at the beginning of Star Wars. They get drunk and read the Bible for the rest of the book.
ME: On my first read, the sisters felt extraneous to the novel. On my second read, I realized that part of the novel’s ambition is to create a typology of late Victorian womanhood—a typology of “odd women,” or what late nineteenth-century feminists would have called the “new woman.” Rhoda uses the term “odd women” to describe women who are not married or paired up.
But I think, in giving us a false start with these minor characters, Gissing is showing how being an “odd woman” has something to do with being unmarried, but not everything to do with it. It also has to do with a woman’s class position, the tension between her gender and her sexuality, and the kind of work that she performs.
I was struck by how Gissing frames all the female characters in terms of types. When we meet Rhoda, he lingers on her face; the second time we encounter her, he describes her as “an unfamiliar sexual type.” There’s something masculine about Rhoda, but when she drops her eyes a certain way and pouts her lip a little bit, it’s not unthinkable that she would be attractive to men.
When we meet Monica as an adult, he describes her as having “a recognized type of prettiness.” Mary Barfoot too is described as an aristocratic type of woman who is fully feminine, which Gissing uses to explains why people trust her.
AD: This cataloging impulse is even embodied in a minor character, Miss Eade, who, at the beginning of the novel, is Monica’s coworker and has a crush on the man who pursues Monica, Mr. Bullivant. By the end of the novel, Miss Eade is a prostitute. “Rhoda Nunn would have classed her and mused about her: a not unimportant type of the odd woman,” Gissing writes. The novel has many strange, tiny, tertiary characters and tertiary plots, many of them feeding into the typology of the “odd woman.”
ME: The typology shapes, and is shaped by, the novel’s two intersecting marriage plots: the terrible marriage of Monica to the elderly Edmund Widdowson and the thrilling courtship of Rhoda by Mary’s rakish cousin Everard Barfoot. When Everard meets Rhoda, he’s fascinated by her aversion to custom, her prickly disposition, her ascetism, and her wit.
That subplot seems, at first, like it will play out like The Taming of the Shrew. The twist—Widdowson suspecting Monica of having an affair with Everard, and the rumor of the affair getting back to Rhoda—puts all the odd women into direct contact with one another: Rhoda, Monica, Virgie, Alice, Mary, even Miss Eade.
AD: We’re clearly made to believe that if Everard and Monica had met on the right day, at the right moment, that theirs would be the love story that would be successful. Everard mentions his ideal type of woman several times (it’s Monica). She thinks a couple times that her ideal is him. Everyone else in the novel is totally paranoid that they’re hooking up. The novel itself is telling us more than the characters know: that they are very well suited for one another.
I think Gissing’s men are a great achievement. Edmund and Everard are awful, but they’re awful in ways that index larger changes in society. Each has inherited a small amount of money and has become indigent: they stop working. (Whereas Mary Barfoot, when she inherits money, starts a school.)
In becoming men of leisure, they don’t seem to know what their identities are, and they attach themselves to our two female leads. Whenever the men see each other, there’s tension between them. They think very little of one another. But they’ve had parallel experiences.
ME: Listening to you, it occurs to me that what Widdowson wants is the marriage between Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester that Jane describes in the epilogue of Charlotte Brontë’s novel. Theirs is a relationship of dependency mistaken for companionship. What Monica wants is less noble. She wants to escape the drapery shop. She wants a house of her own; she doesn’t want to worry about money. She wants freedom.
Widdowson tells her how much money he has and what he can provide for her, believing that it will make her grateful and subservient. They’re not truthful about their own desires, either to each other or to themselves, but they sense them well enough to gravitate to the type of person they believe will satisfy them.
With Rhoda and Everard, I think what draws them to each other is their mutual contempt for women. Both think most women are fools. Neither has any affinity for the working classes.
Rhoda thinks any woman who falters or shows weakness in romance should be punished in the most severe fashion. She cannot understand Mary Barfoot’s sympathy for poor women or women in love. Everard’s recognition of his style of misogyny in her seeds their attraction, which is rotten to its core.
AD: And Gissing gives each of them a female victim. Everard’s is Amy Drake, who he claims seduced and entrapped him by becoming pregnant. He does not care at all about her death. He behaves horrendously. Rhoda’s is Bella Royston, the former student who kills herself because Rhoda won’t allow her back into the school due to her affair with a married man. They each, for reasons of class and their hatred of women, enable a woman’s death. And each approves of the other’s behavior.
ME: They’re united by their devaluation of women and their overvaluation of language. Everard’s an idler, a dilettante, a disgrace to his family. He derives his pleasure mostly from his use of his words, from making jokes, from fashioning a perfectly ironic tone, from coaxing Rhoda to spend time with him or persuading his cousin of his good nature, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Rhoda claims she wants to live a life of service and work, but at the same time, she only respects certain kinds of work. She doesn’t have respect for the work that marriage entails. She doesn’t have respect for housekeeping or child-rearing. She only respects women who can work with their words, because that is an elevated form of work—of intellectual work.
AD: You sent me an illuminating essay by Karen Chase about the role of writing and reading in The Odd Women. Rhoda is helping other women become typists. They’re learning to write, to copy, and to be scribes.
And this is an oddly epistolary novel for its period. All four of the leads, especially the men, do their wooing with writing. Widdowson’s letters win him his wife, and there’s a heartbreaking scene after they’re married, where he can only apologize to her by leaving an eight-page letter on the dining table.
As a married person myself, it wouldn’t be my move, but he has no other way to be honest. When he writes, he’s moving toward who he wants to be. When he’s embodied as a man, he disgraces himself. Everard’s letters to Rhoda, which he writes when he’s traveling, are the opposite. He just keeps talking about how hot everyone he sees is, and she sees through this.
ME: They’re both transparently unconvincing writers and limited readers. When Widdowson instructs his wife to read, he says, “You shall read John Ruskin; every word he says about women is good and precious. If a woman can neither have a home of her own, nor find occupation in any one else’s, she is deeply to be pitied; her life is bound to be unhappy.”
He wants badly for her to read novels that he believes will ennoble her rather than entertain her. Of course, that really speaks to the flaw of their marriage: it’s pious and boring.
AD: Widdowson’s mode of reading is like a horror show. He sits for hours with Adam Smith, tediously copying his words, and believes his wife should do the same.
I love that the novel gives no pretense about them. Monica and Widdowson’s wedding is one of the great scenes in the book. Everyone just cries, they’re so miserable. There was never a moment where you really believed in their love. In a marriage plot, you expect some glimmer of hope before or after the wedding, but Monica very clearly sees the futility of her marriage the entire way down.
It’s a novel that promises romance, then denies it thoroughly, repeatedly.
ME: It’s a novel that promises romance, then denies it thoroughly, repeatedly. Think of when Monica meets and falls for Mr. Bevis, the poor, frivolous singer. He dedicates a song to her, whispers some insinuating things in her ear, and she thinks he’s in love. She tries to escape Widdowson by begging Bevis to take her to France with him.
AD: He’s horrified. “He had not in him the stuff of vigorous rascality, still less the only other quality which can support a man in such a situation as this—heroism of moral revolt.” He is not up for it.
ME: He can do nothing except write her a saccharine letter that disabuses her of the feelings she had for him. You wait for her and Widdowson to reconcile. You wait for him to change and for Monica to triumph. But, of course, that’s not what happens. Nothing can redeem a love that never existed.
AD: There’s a history of criticism from readers who were desperate for Everard and Rhoda to get together. This is probably just me being manipulated, but I was rooting for it too, though I knew I was stupid to root for it. When they go on their big outing, when they profess their love on the beach, you know it’s not going to work out, but your heart beats fast when they kiss.
ME: They find themselves in an interesting bind, don’t they? One of the reasons that they’re attracted to each other is because they both believe themselves to be exceptional. Rhoda thinks that she is not a typical woman because she doesn’t believe in marriage. She wants to retain her independence, to be the odd woman. Everard believes that he loves her because of that and that loving an exceptional woman enhances his exceptionality. For her to agree to marry him would prove both wrong.
AD: They share a perverse impulse. Each of the men has a writer he admires. Widdowson has Ruskin, who the book just destroys. Every forty pages, Gissing stops to give Ruskin a little kick and then keeps going. Everard has Keats. When he considers Rhoda’s anger, he thinks of “Ode to Melancholy”: “Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, / Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave.”
He has a desire to overpower Rhoda, but, like Bevis, he doesn’t know what to do with this desire. If he achieved it, he would be quite horrified. He wants to dominate her, and she wants to dominate him, but then each of them also wants to be dominated.
ME: When Everard proposes to Rhoda that they live together in a free union, he thinks, “He must be able to regard her as magnanimous, a woman who had proved herself worth living or dying for. And he must have the joy of subduing her to his will.”
But these are contradictory desires. A magnanimous woman is a woman who gives of her own free will, not one who lets herself be subdued to the will of another. But Everard’s desire for domination is too strong. He can’t be with a magnanimous woman. His ideal type is a fantasy, founded on a paradox.
Everard and Rhoda both claim they want the other person to prove their love, but they really want proof of how willing the other is to be dominated. It makes me think of Mr. Knightley’s description, in Emma, of “the very material matrimonial point of submitting your own will, and doing as you were bid.”
AD: They keep having these chiasmatic moments, going into conversations with one intention, then leaving with the opposite one. Everard’s proposal to Rhoda is fantastic. I reread it several times, because it all happens very fast, for us and for them. You feel later that they each regret how quickly the moment passed and how poorly they represented their ideals. They can’t get it right. They don’t know how to be with one another.
ME: It becomes clearer after the proposal that their ideals are pressurized by their class positions. Marriage for Everard only becomes thinkable once his brother dies and he inherits his money. But once he inherits, he befriends a new class of people: “that of wealthy and cultured people who seek no prominence, who shrink from contact with the circles known as ‘smart,’ who possess their souls in quiet freedom.”
When he goes back to Rhoda after their initial split, he suddenly sees her intellect as foreign and her politics as low. He thinks, “If this woman had enjoyed the social advantages to which…others were doubtless indebted for so much of their charm, would she not have been their equal, or more? For the first time he compassionated Rhoda.”
His compassion is the death of his love. They are over, irrevocably.
AD: The two books I read before The Odd Women were Sense and Sensibility and The Portrait of a Lady. Both great, both about women who suddenly have access to the higher classes.
The Odd Women never gives us that. It will not let these characters escape the relatively banal middle-class spaces they’re in. It is not a lushly described novel. Everything is a little shabby. There’s never a moment where the prose really soars. I think the best visual scene in the novel, unsurprisingly, is a scene of such dense fog that no one can see anything.
ME: You’re reminding me of one of the essays that I sent you when we were preparing for this talk, a chapter on Gissing from Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious. Jameson offers a brilliant assessment of Gissing’s prose, which he praises for its “electrical dryness.”
He argues that there is something deliberately muted or unadorned about the style of The Odd Women, which he connects to the style of the stenographer, the typist, the clerk. These are all para-literary positions, in which one must faithfully and rapidly transcribe other people’s spoken language—and not, for instance, represent the slow and intricate refinement of consciousness.
AD: Gissing allows himself a little repetition, but the prose is bleached—I think “bleached” is Jameson’s term—and it’s the thing I really enjoyed about the novel. Maybe it’s because I had just read The Portrait of a Lady, so bleached prose felt like a relief.
ME: Perhaps Gissing believes his duty to the novel in 1893 is to turn away from the ornamental, the decadent. Perhaps his duty is to pursue an ambivalent relationship to realism by eschewing the language of aesthetic autonomy, the idiom of the aesthetes, of Pater and James, for the language of the middle classes and their prose genres.
AD: He feels like a missing link in literary history, a bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He’s not a modernist, but his characters go to Gilbert and Sullivan shows. He’s suspended between worlds as a writer and critical of what he sees. Orwell writes of him:
In the shadow of the atomic bomb it is not easy to talk confidently about progress. However, if it can be assumed that we are not going to be blown to pieces in about ten years’ time, there are many reasons, and George Gissing’s novels are among them, for thinking that the present age is a good deal better than the last one.
ME: What did this novel make you think about marriage in the present age and the last one?
AD: The Odd Women feels like a cri de coeur against marriage. Reading it, I kept thinking about how Gissing himself felt duty bound to marriage but also defeated by it. He had to drop out of university because he had an affair with a prostitute named Nell Harrison, for whom he stole money from his classmates.
They married, and it was a bad marriage. She died, and he immediately launched into another bad marriage with Edith Underwood, who was eventually institutionalized. Then he entered a common-law marriage with a neurotic translator.
All the marriages in this book seem horrifying to me. But the model of marriage that Rhoda extols presents an ideal of mutual non-dependence. At some points, it even felt like they were talking about open marriages. You can see the seeds of contemporary marriage discourse in the horrors of the late nineteenth-century marriages that Gissing was entrenched in his whole life.
ME: The moment when Everard proposes the common-law marriage or the free union to Rhoda, he says, “If we cannot trust each other without legal bonds, any union between us would be unjustified.” It raises some crucial questions: What justifies marriage? Is marriage only a legal bind?
Or is the essence of marriage what exceeds the legal bind? That is, if a marriage is seen only as a legal bind, has it failed to be a marriage?
AD: You can understand why Widdowson doesn’t want Monica to read novels. They’re all about love, which has no logical relation to marriage. And Rhoda scorns the unreality of novels too:
Love—love—love; a sickening sameness of vulgarity. What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists? They won’t represent the actual world; it would be too dull for their readers. In real life, how many men and women fall in love?….Not one married pair in ten thousand.
The book is pointing to the idea that marriage is, on average, a contract negotiation.
ME: You’re making me think that the Rhoda and Everard plotline does have a happy ending, even—or especially—as an ending divorced from marriage. That’s precisely what makes it happy. They’ve had a brief taste of a free union. They’ve had a beautiful day in the country and a passionate night on the beach. They’ve enjoyed each other without the bind of the contract.
AD: As she thinks, “If only she had once been loved, like other women—if she had listened to an offer of devotion, and rejected it—her heart would be more securely at peace.” It’s exactly what she believes will make her most effective in her life’s work.
The book is pointing to the idea that marriage is, on average, a contract negotiation.
ME: You have one overtly bleak ending and one covertly happy ending, which is difficult to see because we readers are still beholden to the marriage plot. The two endings are drawn together in the novel’s final scene, in which Rhoda cradles Monica’s baby girl after Monica has died in childbirth. The last three words of the novel are Rhoda’s address to the uncomprehending child: “Poor little child!”
This is a child born around 1890. When she grows up, she will be able to vote. Working outside the home will no longer be scandalous, but all the vexations and limitations of marriage will persist.
AD: It’s a more optimistic future than Gissing might have expected.
ME: It sends us back to the beginning with Tennyson. How will the world permit this poor little child to live? What kind of odd woman will she be?
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The Odd Women by George Gissing with new forewords by Merve Emre and Adam Dalva is available via Unnamed Press.
