The Odd Women – and a possible mirror today
I'm just reading George Gissing's The Odd Women, a curious novel centred on women's prospects in the late 19th century. These were pretty dismal on the whole. The novel focusses on three sisters caught in a kind of genteel poverty. Two of them are past marriageable age, and also have hardly any chance of a decent occupation but must live on the tiny income bequeathed by their father. The third is still pretty and eligible, but works 14-hour days in a draper's, with very little scope for meeting a suitable husband. The title refers to something which I find hard to explain: the apparent existence then of half a million more women than men…
Read More