The Odd Women (Oxford World’s Classics) Read online

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  GEORGE GISSING

  The Odd Women

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  PATRICIA INGHAM

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  THE ODD WOMEN

  GEORGE GISSING was born in Wakefield in 1857. His promising academic career was cut short when, in 1876, he was dismissed from Owens College, Manchester, after stealing money in order to help the prostitute, Nell Harrison, start a new life. After a month’s hard labour and a year in the United States, he returned to England, married Nell, and began a life of constant literary activity. The early years were spent in poverty and domestic discord; his wife died in 1888. A series of novels, beginning with Workers in the Dawn (1880) and culminating in The Nether World (1889) attracted some notice, but financial security continued to elude him. It was not until 1891, with the publication of New Grub Street, that Gissing was acknowledged as a major writer. In the same year he married for a second time, no less disastrously than before. Many novels followed, notably Born in Exile (1892), The Odd Women (1893), In the Year of Jubilee (1894) and The Crown of Life (1899): the dominant note was one of dour pessimism. Gissing moved to France in 1899 to live with Gabrielle Fleury. Widespread acclaim greeted The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft in 1903, but at the end of that year Gissing died.

  PATRICIA INGHAM is a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. Her publications include Thomas Hardy: A Feminist Reading (1989), Dickens, Women and Language (1992), and The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel (1996). She has also edited Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, The Woodlanders, and The Well-Beloved.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of George Gissing

  Map: The London of The Odd Women

  THE ODD WOMEN

  Explanatory Notes

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I should like to thank Jenny Harrington and Shannon Russell for their help in preparing this edition; and also the staff of St Anne’s College library.

  INTRODUCTION

  The title of George Gissing’s novel The Odd Women (1893) is in its way as provocative as the subtitle ‘A Pure Woman’ that Hardy added belatedly to Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). It is a play on the then fashionable topic of the New Woman which enjoyed its heyday in the first half of the 1890s. In using it Gissing is alluding to W. R. Greg’s famous article ‘Why are Women Redundant?’ in The National Review1 in which women are seen as redundant because at a marriageable age their numbers exceed those of their male counterparts. He sees the ‘cure’ as emigration and an acceptance of the poverty that marriage may bring to less wealthy couples. As Rhoda Nunn explains the bad news to Monica Madden, ‘there are half a million more women than men in this unhappy country of ours… So many odd women—no making a pair with them. The pessimists call them useless, lost, futile lives’ (p. 44). New Woman novels challenged the belief that unmarried women were ‘lost’ lives (using an adjective often applied to prostitutes) by showing in a romantic fashion that women really only found their full identity outside the constraints of contemporary marriage. In such novels as Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Yellow Aster by ‘Iota’ (1894) the heroines strike grand attitudes while rejecting marriage before or after the event. A single life, it is asserted, is a choice, the best choice, not an imposition (though that only seems to be true if a marriage is on offer). Usually, however, as in these two texts, the women either submit to a husband or the fictional alternative—death.

  Gissing satirizes these romantic accounts of the New Woman by changing the epithet. In doing so he takes up Greg’s conventional perception of unmarried women as superfluous because ‘unpaired’ and makes the point that this involves seeing them as ‘odd’ in the more common sense of ‘abnormal, eccentric’. They are generally viewed as marginal not just numerically but in relation to the ideal of womanhood. The change from singular to plural in the noun ‘woman’ is a challenge to the idea of a unitary ‘woman’ that is pushed further by the wide range of individual women who people his narrative. In addition to Mary Barfoot, whose aim is to make unmarried women self-supporting, and Rhoda Nunn, who is against marriage on principle because it involves inequality between husband and wife, there are many other unstereotypical female characters. Monica Widdowson (née Madden) marries out of poverty into unexpectedly painful comfort and tries fiercely to escape her pathologically jealous husband. Her attempt at a New Woman elopement of the romantic sort fails dismally when Bevis, the lover, loses his nerv
e. One of her (unmarried) sisters commits suicide, another, Alice, takes to religiosity, and a third, Virginia, becomes an alcoholic. Around these central figures cluster others who reject matrimony—including the vestal virgin, Mildred Vesper, a natural celibate; Mrs Cosgrove, who ‘though in the general belief her marriage had been a happy one’ holds views ‘on the matrimonial relation of singular audacity’; and a group referred to by the narrator as a ‘not unimportant type of the odd women’—prostitutes (p. 331).

  The New Woman novel was a short-lived species of the fantasy genre in fiction which, by adopting a conventionally romantic form, largely vitiated its own effectiveness in furthering women’s causes. It could even be turned to cynical purposes by the male author, Grant Allen, who in The Woman Who Did created a universally acceptable bestseller. His title reveals where his emphasis lay: not on the woman who did not marry but on the woman who did cohabit with a lover in a free union. It brought him an income which Gissing conspicuously envied. Gissing’s variation on this form of novel is far more significant. Although its title suggests a narrow range of unexciting material, this is misleading. So too is any interpretation of it which deals with it in the purely biographical terms of much Gissing criticism. It is easy to see why such criticism abounds. Gissing’s life has all the ingredients for a melodrama. Having been born in 1857 to a pharmacist in modest circumstances, he managed to become a student at Owens College, Manchester. His university career ended when in 1876 he received a prison sentence for stealing money from the cloakroom there to support the young prostitute Nell Harrison with whom he was living. His later marriage to her was a disaster because of her alcoholism. But after Nell’s death he married another working-class woman and this too proved unsuccessful, apparently because of Edith’s instability and violence. Finally, because he was refused a divorce, he set up house with Gabrielle Fleury in France where he died. Most of his life was spent in poverty as he struggled to earn a living as a writer while living with first Nell and then Edith. As Edith found it impossible to look after the older of their two sons, he was brought up by Gissing’s siblings.

  The novel, however, is best illuminated by showing how it engages with all the major social and sexual issues that were fiercely debated as the nineteenth century approached its close. The debates were fuelled, as in other centuries, by the sense of dissolution that accompanied the century’s end. The period was often seen as anarchic in predictable Armageddon scenarios. Certainly there was a measure of social anarchy, but some took a less gloomy view of it than this. Any biographical references, any echoes of Gissing’s own life, letters, or diary, merely give specificity to an enactment of the intellectual uncertainty and conflicts of the time for a man born into his circumstances, which shaped him as well as his text.

  Gissing’s most obvious change in the genre was simple. 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. She reads his clothes as ‘such as any gentleman wears’; but then wonders, ‘Was it a bad sign that he carried neither gloves nor walking-stick?’ (p. 38). At a later meeting she answers her own question reassuringly: ‘After all, he was not a companion to be ashamed of. She looked with pleasure at his white hairy hands with their firm grip; and then at his boots—very good boots indeed. He had gold cuff links in his white shirt cuffs, and a gold watch-guard chosen with a ‘gentleman’s taste’ (p. 48).

  But this Balzacian detail is not morally neutral. It is sharply judgemental in the pointed contrast it makes between the lifestyles of the relatively affluent and the poor. In Mary Barfoot’s ‘pleasant, old-fashioned drawing room’ Monica spells out the details of a shopgirl’s life: twenty minutes or less for each meal; ‘no sitting down behind the counter’; one week’s annual paid holiday; a sixteen-hour Saturday; only Sunday free which must be spent away from shop premises; the ‘very scantiest’ of meals. The physical consequences of poverty are coolly underlined: varicose veins for shop assistants caused by too much standing and ill-health already for the Madden sisters by their thirties. Alice Madden is clay-coloured, pimply, inclined to corpulence, and subject to headaches, backaches, and other disorders. Virginia at 33 has an unhealthy look because ‘the poverty, or vitiation of her blood’ manifests itself in signs of ageing; and she has become a secret drinker (p. 14). Her visit to Rhoda shortly after these descriptions counterpoints them ag
ainst the physical signs of wealth in her host: ‘a vigorous frame’ and ‘brisk movement’ (p. 25).

  Accounts of such inequities in social groups at this time lacked a generally accepted justificatory framework and so there developed new explanatory discourses. These often took a sanctimonious tone in which to suggest that progress upwards was available to all who exerted themselves. An instance of this is found in Samuel Smiles’s popular Self-Help (1859) which made the now familiar claim that ‘the spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual’.3 This is amplified by his assertion that ‘opportunities fall in the way of every man who is resolved to take advantage of them’.4 Versions of Smiles’s theories had the bonus of validating the developing notion that the working classes could be neatly divided into the deserving and the undeserving poor. The new taxonomy paralleled the division between middle and working classes in an apparently natural symmetry. The idea was later in the century given a fashionably evolutionary tinge by the theory of ‘degeneracy’. This theory was based on the argument that the natural process of weeding out the unfittest human individuals had been hindered by medical and sanitary improvements in recent decades. These had kept alive ‘thousands of persons who would have died even fifty years ago’.5 Generations bred in urban slums had been allowed to evolve into physical and moral degenerates incapable of improvement. They constituted ‘the residuum’, the dregs of society.

  At the same time as the self-help theory spread, there was much discussion about the nature of the working classes when contrasted with the middle class. Were they a different species—fish as opposed to higher forms of life? The prevailing perception that they were was thoughtfully considered by the liberal economist Alfred Marshall in 1873. To define both middle and working classes he examines the working man, that Other to his superiors. He sees him characterized not by the work he does but by the effect of hard physical labour upon a human being. Such labour makes a man rude and coarse. These qualities are shown by his lack of social ease, his inability to anticipate the feelings of others or to avoid giving pain or annoyance to others over trivialities. These defects are not culpable since they are the inevitable result of the ‘lowering influences’ of physical work. Fatigue makes the mind ‘dull and sluggish’; and in extreme cases causes cravings for ‘the coarser pleasures—drink, ignoble jests and worse’.6 The absence of this coarseness and the presence of social ease, delicacy of feeling towards others, and an unsluggish mind, theoretically, in the paradigm case, characterize the middle class.