The Odd Women

The Odd Women PDF

Author: George Gissing

Publisher: Graphic Arts Books

Published: 2021-05-14

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1513286528

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Odd Women (1893) is a novel by George Gissing. Inspired by a report of over one million more women living in Britain than men, Gissing sought to explore the societal and personal implications of unmarried life while exploring the demands of the growing feminist movement. The Odd Women is a story of romance, independence, and the pressures of society that poses important questions about convention in Victorian England while proving surprisingly relevant for our own times. After moving together to London, the unmarried Madden sisters rekindle their relationship with Rhoda, a neighbor and friend from their childhood in Clevedon. Rhoda, also unmarried, lives with Mary Barfoot, with whom she runs a secretarial school for young women. While Monica, the youngest Madden sister, is bullied into marrying Edmund Widdowson, a middle-aged brute, Rhoda rejects the advances of Mary’s cousin Everard. Opposed to marriage altogether, Rhoda is initially able to avoid the fate of Monica, who suffers in her stifling relationship with Edmund and longs for a younger, romantic man named Bevis. Striking up an affair, Monica meets secretly with Bevis while attempting to avoid the suspicions of her jealous, overbearing husband. When a detective hired by Edmund sees Monica knock on the door of Everard’s apartment, Edmund sets out to smear the innocent man’s name just as he has secured an engagement with the reluctant Rhoda. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of George Gissing’s The Odd Women is a classic work of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

The Odd Women

The Odd Women PDF

Author: George Gissing

Publisher: Broadview Press

Published: 1998-02-23

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9781551111117

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

George Gissing’s The Odd Women dramatizes key issues relating to class and gender in late-Victorian culture: the changing relationship between the sexes, the social impact of ‘odd’ or ‘redundant’ women, the cultural impact of ‘the new woman,’ and the opportunities for and conditions of employment in the expanding service sector of the economy. At the heart of these issues as many late Victorians saw them was a problem of the imbalance in the ratio of men to women in the population. There were more females than males, which meant that more and more women would be left unmarried; they would be ‘odd’ or ‘redundant,’ and would be forced to be independent and to find work to support themselves. In the Broadview edition, Gissing’s text is carefully annotated and accompanied by a range of documents from the period that help to lay out the context in which the book was written. In Gissing’s story, Virginia Madden and her two sisters are confronted upon the death of their father with sudden impoverishment. Without training for employment, and desperate to maintain middle-class respectability, they face a daunting struggle. In Rhoda Nunn, a strong feminist, Gissing also presents a strong character who draws attention overtly to the issues behind the novel. The Odd Women is one of the most important social novels of the late nineteenth century.

George Gissing

George Gissing PDF

Author: Martin Ryle

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-28

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1351157469

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Once seen as a relatively marginal figure, George Gissing (1857-1903) persists in sparking interest among new generations of radical critics who continue to be inspired by his work and to develop fresh approaches to it. This essay collection, bringing together British, European, and North American literary critics and cultural historians with diverse specialities and interests, demonstrates the range of contemporary perspectives through which his fiction can be viewed. Offering both closely contextualized historical readings and broader cultural and philosophical assessments, the contributions will engage not only the specialist but those interested in the diverse themes that absorbed Gissing: the cultural and social formation of class and gender, social mobility and its unsettling effects on individual and collective identities, the place of writing in emerging mass culture, and the possibilities and limits of fiction as critical intervention.

The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part I

The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part I PDF

Author: Pierre Coustillas

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-09-30

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 131730408X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This ambitious three-volume biography on Gissing examines both his life and writing chronologically and in close detail. Part I covers Gissing’s early life up until his establishment as a writer of moderate critical success.

Born in Exile

Born in Exile PDF

Author: George Gissing

Publisher: The Floating Press

Published: 2009-08-01

Total Pages: 853

ISBN-13: 1775416488

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Born in Exile is an 1892 novel by George Robert Gissing, a prominent realist author of late-Victorian England who wrote twenty-three novels between 1880 and 1903.

The Paying Guest

The Paying Guest PDF

Author: George Gissing

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2020-07-16

Total Pages: 70

ISBN-13: 3752300558

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Reproduction of the original: The Paying Guest by George Gissing

George Gissing

George Gissing PDF

Author: Paul Delany

Publisher: Orion

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 538

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

George Orwell was asked to write a biography of George Gissing, having hailed him as 'perhaps the best novelist England has produced.' He had to refuse, and instead of a book like this one, Orwell wrote a novel, 1984. His closeness to Gissing can help draw the map of English literature from 1880 to 1950. Orwell was born in the year that Gissing died, 1903. Both of them lived 46 years and died of lung disease. It is likely that Orwell borrowed the first name of his pseudonym from Gissing. Orwell, though, chose to live among the poor to begin a lifelong commitment to leftist politics. Gissing became poor by bad luck and bad judgement; he came to believe that political solutions were unlikely to abolish human misery, and declared that the great subject of his novels was the situation of educated people with 'not enough money.' Paul Delany's has read Gissing's 22 novels, and his other works, with a fine biographer's eye. Gissing was a neurotic writer, and everything in his later life was determined by the twin disasters of his imprisonment and his marriage to Nell Harrison. Prison he concealed altogether. It could be argued that Victorian society rested on hypocrisy, requiring everyone to lie about their desires. But the major figures in Gissing's novels are almost always bad liars. In his own case a mistake in youth created daily misery that he could never shake off. Yet Gissing the novelist gives us better than anyone the flavour of London in the 1880s and 1890s: a compound of wet streets, fog, coal-smoke, narrow horizons, and an imagination equal to it all. In Paul Delany he has found the perfect biographer.

The Essential George Gissing Collection

The Essential George Gissing Collection PDF

Author: George R. Gissing

Publisher: eBookIt.com

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 9999

ISBN-13: 1456613723

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Compiled in one book, the essential collection of books by George Gissing: Born in Exile By the Ionian Sea The Crown of Life Demos The Emancipated Eve's Ransom The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories In the Year of Jubilee A Life's Morning The Nether World New Grub Street The Odd Women Our Friend the Charlatan The Paying Guest The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft The Town Traveller Veranilda The Whirlpool