Book Review: The Odd Women

[osprey_archer]

George Gissing's The Odd Women is indeed a very odd book, although not quite as odd as I had hoped from the first few chapters, which concern the unmarried Madden sisters, who barely scraping by in the genteel occupations. They receive a jolt of hope when they meet an old acquaintance, Rhoda Nunn, who is running a small school that teaches young women the skills to join that exciting career newly available to women: clerkship.

(It's interesting, as a side note, to see how exciting new careers seemed as they opened up to women - teaching! nursing! typewriting! - and then in their turn became the stultifying new limits of a women's world.)

After this the story settles down into the more familiar shape of a Victorian romance, as if Gissing just isn't quite sure if you can tell a story about women that isn't a romance, although to give him credit he's certainly straining at the boundaries of the genre. I particularly liked the friendship between Rhoda Nunn and Miss Barfoot, particularly the part where they have a serious argument - which is not about a man! - and then reconcile after Miss Barfoot gives a stirring speech that taps into their shares principles.

Except later Gissing retcons it so that it totally was about a man, subconsciously: Miss Barfoot used to have a crush on her cousin Everard and now Everard and Rhoda Nunn are making eyes at each other and... So it goes.

However! Everard and Rhoda do not get together: Rhoda ends up re-dedicating herself to her work with the "odd women," that is to say spinsters, after a sequence of events in which she accepts his proposal, breaks up with him because he's been accused of committing adultery with a married women, reconcile once Rhoda discovers the story is not true... but still says, "Nah, not going to marry you after all."

She's come to realize that his love for her isn't quite...I'm having trouble finding the right word to describe what's wrong with his love. In the beginning he started wooing her because it seemed like a challenge to win someone so set on staying a spinster, and then he does fall in love with her, but the motive of conquest is still smoldering away in the background: there's a powerful element of vanity about his love. If he's so great that he can make her fall for him despite her principles, why, he must be pretty great.

In this sense he's not so far from the other leading man in this book, Mr. Widdowson, although Everard is a progressive on women's rights while Mr. Widdowson clings to the early Victorian conception of a wife who is utterly subsumed in her husband. Everard can’t land his girl; Mr. Widdowson ends up driving his wife Monica, nee Madden, to the brink of adultery.

Even in this progressive novel - even though she didn’t actually cheat on her husband! - Monica can’t escape the narrative punishment for her crime: she dies in childbirth.

But caring for her orphaned baby finally gives her two remaining Madden sisters the push they need to make concrete plans to open that school they’ve been wistfully planning for the whole book, so that’s nice.

Comments

[ancientreader]

I wonder what you'd think of Arnold Bennett's Riceyman Steps -- not that I know what I'd think of it myself now, because I read it thirty years ago and so many of my perceptions have changed since then. I dimly remember being surprised by his perceptiveness toward his women characters. Probably setting myself up for a fall, there.

ETA. Your parenthetical about exciting new careers for women is painfully accurate. Typist! Or it was called type-writer at first, IIRC.

[osprey_archer]

I think perhaps this conveyor belt from "exciting new career for women!" to "career straitjacket into which women are marched lockstep" has slowed down - I feel like a lot of the careers for women that were viewed as new & exciting in the seventies still seem new and exciting today (scientist! legislator! astronaut!) but maybe that's because those careers remain relatively rare for women - they haven't become identified with women like teacher or secretary.

[sovay]

but the motive of conquest is still smoldering away in the background: there's a powerful element of vanity about his love. If he's so great that he can make her fall for him despite her principles, why, he must be pretty great.

That sounds like a good person not to spend the rest of your life with.

[landofnowhere]

I am not a fan of Everard Barfoot (except for his excellent name), but to be fair, there is some symmetry in the relationship. Everard Barfoot claims to be opposed to marriage on his own principles of free love, though it may really be just because he doesn't have the money (his family disinherited him after he refused to marry the girl he got pregnant). So Rhoda has her own desire to make a conquest of him -- although she's generally less of an egotist about everything.

For another author this whole setup would make for a romantic comedy in the vein of "Much Ado" where two people opposed to marriage fall in love in spite of themselves. But Gissing is too much of a realist/pessimist on marriage to ever write that.

In general, in Gissing's books marriage is generally a terrible idea. This seems to have been based on his personal experience: reading Wikipedia, it sounds like he was a terrible husband, and I suspect he had some of both Barfoot and Widdowson in him.

In another book, "New Grub Street", which I also recommend, he has a married couple who are unhappy not because either of them is awful or abusive, but because they have fundamentally incompatible life priorities and not enough money. Gissing comments on how liberalized divorce laws and universal childcare would both have been a great help for them.

[osprey_archer]

TBF I feel that he is a more complex person than my summary makes him sound... but at the end of the day, I was 100% on board with Rhoda's decision not to spend the rest of her life with him, A++ ditching of an ultimately unsatisfactory suitor would read again.

[landofnowhere]

Thank you, this is an excellent description of a book that I wish more people would read! (And I may have to reread it sometime soon myself.)

Related to your comment about the excitement of the opening up of pink-collar jobs: when I read the book, I was also struck by the fact that the characters weren't even ready to dream of equal pay for equal work. The activists were talking along the lines of "yes, we're undercutting men's wages, but it's worth it for the cause".

I also remember noticing how extremely un-femslashy the Rhoda/Miss Barfoot relationship is. There's a theatre adaptation of the book (The Age of Arousal) that makes the two women into lovers, which is the sort of thing we'd expect from a modern perspective -- but none of that is in the book!

[osprey_archer]

It's quite a compelling book, really! It's too bad more people haven't read it. But I suspect that the people who would most like it might be put off it for the same reason I didn't read it for so many years: "Can a late Victorian man really have anything interesting to say about the Woman Question?" Turns out the answer is yes, but who knew?

I actually kind of loved the fact that Rhoda & Miss Barfoot were such bros. It's so unusual (still!) to get a book where a women's friendship is central and weathers a conflict without years-long estrangement, I loved the part where they fought about the girl (even if Gissing later was like "Actually it was subconsciously about Everard!") and then reconciled after Miss Barfoot's speech.

[landofnowhere]

True! I read New Grub Street first; I'm not sure I would have picked up this book otherwise.

Speaking of men expounding on the Woman Question, have you read H. G. Wells's Ann Veronica? Not that I would recommend it to you if you haven't: it's well-written and has some effective scenes, but completely falls down at portraying female-female relationships: the protagonist self-describes as a "feminist who doesn't hate men" but really she's a "feminist who doesn't like women" and I feel like the story doesn't respect its women characters either.

More recently I read Edith Ayrton Zangwill's The Call, which is clearly influenced by Ann Veronica but is much better in almost all ways (though technically not as good at the writing style). The protagonist starts out as a "not like other girls" type who finds the suffragettes to be too radical, but transforms over the course of the book and ends up in solidarity with other women. All the women in the book end up having hidden depths! Also the protagonist is actually passionate about science! (This book is currently available for purchase as e-book, or you can wait until 2020 when it will be in the public domain.)

I also read A Woman and Her Husband by Amber Reeves, who was the real-life model for Ann Veronica -- and unlike her fictional counterpart, she actually cares about other women! It's both a socialist and feminist book: the protagonist is an empty-nester woman who spends her newfound spare time investigating the working conditions at her husband's restaurant chain (that she co-owns but has never previously taken an interest in). To the surprise of everyone but the reader, she's unhappy with what she sees, and the book is about what she does about it, and how this affects her relationship with her husband.