Women's Reading as Protest in Gissing's The Odd Women :

"I'll see how I like this first"

Elizabeth Shand

English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Volume 62, Number 1,

2019, pp. 53-71 (Article)

Published by ELT Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/710488

[185.194.8.251] Project MUSE (2025-03-02 23:30 GMT)

 Women’s Reading as Protest
in Gissing’s The Odd Women:
“I’ll see how I like this first”

ELIZABETH SHAND
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

SCENES OF READING PERMEATE George Gissing’s The Odd

Women (1893): a young wife picks up a paperback novel; a militant
New Woman builds a proto-feminist library; a factory girl diligently
studies history books; and a husband encloses himself in his library of
classics. As part of its primary focus on “the female cause,”1 The Odd
Women uses reading as a lens through which to explore the social and
intellectual life of women in late-nineteenth-century London. While
Gissing’s critical interest in late-nineteenth-century print culture is
widely acknowledged,2 this article specifically emphasizes his inter-
est in the relation between material print culture and gender politics.
Gissing elucidates a shifting significance of women’s reading as an act
of social protest that remains unexplored within the novel’s historical
framework. The Odd Women’s readers—across variant social classes
and political alliances—are either embedded within or resistant to
the alleged dangers that the literary landscape posed to women. The
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heightened socio-political significance of literary form at the close of

the nineteenth century ultimately allows the novel’s heroine, Monica
Madden, to use cheap, popular fiction as a tool to declare her break
from conventional femininity.
Situated within the transitional literary landscape of 1870s and
1880s England,3 The Odd Women counters contemporary critical dis-
course that regulated women’s reading.4 Although there are many read-
ers in The Odd Women that could be discussed within this transition,
this discussion focuses on the most contested, Monica. As the youngest
Madden sister, she is the most protected under the care of her family

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circle but simultaneously the most modern woman in age, making her
particularly susceptible to discourse surrounding the woman reader.
The literature she does access ranges from the canonical suggestions
of her oldest sister and husband to the self-selection of cheap paper-
backs. Critics tend to dismiss or critique Monica’s fiction reading as di-
sastrously sentimental: Christina Ceron writes that Monica’s ­naiveté
leads her to disregard “her real life in order to play the role of the
heroine in a romance”;5 Lise Shapiro Sanders and Marisa Knox argue
that Monica’s turn to cheap paperback novels represents a turn to ro-
mantic illusions that ultimately degrades and destroys her;6 and Kate
Flint sees Monica’s romance reading as a fatal consumption caused by
a system that constrains upper-middle-class women.7 Such readings,
however, delimit Monica’s complex personal development throughout
the novel by insisting that the only mode of reading romance novels is
one of idealistic consumption; they fail to consider Monica’s maturation
rooted in her novel-reading.
A converse analysis of Monica’s reading is informed by recent work in
book history and material studies that assess the material rather than
textual significance of books to nineteenth-century readers.8 Questions
remain, for example, regarding women’s own understanding and use
of their increased access to fiction. To this point, Jennifer Phegley calls
for further analysis of “the rhetorical and visual construction of read-
ers within their socio-historical contexts”9—or inquiries that consider
the socio-political tensions entwined in depictions of individual reading
experiences. By considering Monica’s self-assertion declared through
cheap fiction alongside contemporary critical dismissals of similar
reading, this article identifies the significance of cheap fiction as a sym-
bol of women’s social protest. Considered within the full scope of read-
ing in The Odd Women, Monica’s reading is a combative act through
which she wrests against shifting structures of traditional Victorian
femininity. The Odd Women thus presents Gissing’s progressive convic-
tion that a transitioning print culture opened new avenues for women’s
social and political identities.
The declaration of subjective identity through literature was one ef-
fect of the symbolic status accrued by literary form during the period’s
profusion of new works.10 Impossible to distinguish “good” from “bad”
fiction based on title or author alone, literary criticism attempted to

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preserve a healthy cultural atmosphere11 through rhetorical control of

form: a commercially cheap form implied socially destitute content and
reader. “Shilling shockers,” for example, were supposedly comparable
to “a shilling’s worth of sweeties”: both were wasteful, self-indulgent,
and quickly consumed.12 Railway stall editions were similarly scorned
by critics as nothing more than “strawberry ices of literature” that
spoil the mind.13 Critical rhetoric disassociated the material objectiv-
ity of new, cheap fiction from any elevated notion of literature: “second-
rate passions” and “vulgar scandals” were nothing more than “things
in books clothing,”14 according to Lucy Soulsby, headmistress of a girls’
private school. The preponderance of language that politicized cheap
literary form as significant of a supposedly depraved modern mind un-
derscores cultural anxiety over women’s reading. However, contempo-
rary discourse also created the space for women readers to use books,
now situated as culturally significant objects, to declare allegiance or
resistance to notions of femininity.
Gissing recognizes the new values that fin-de-siècle print culture
presented as well as those it replaced. The generational distinc-
tions in reading experiences depicted in The Odd Women evokes Lisa
­Gitelman’s discussions of the shifting states of media:15 rather than
framing new media as “points of epistemic rupture,” Gitelman argues
that the conversations surrounding new media reveal the cultural ne-
gotiations and contestations that determine the historical fate of new
media.16 The viability of paperback fiction in the fin de siècle, for ex-
ample, was first negotiated by a multiplicity of users: an institution
of literary criticism and readers themselves. Before paperback fiction
could become essentially “valueless” in the present moment, in both
an economic and cultural sense, past readers and critics wrestled with
the values that it proposed or replaced. One such value is the exacer-
bated relation between reading choice and femininity. Gissing aligns
with the notion that fin-de-siècle discourse on female readers largely
relied on outdated notions of women’s desires and experiences, par-
taking in a delayed narrative about women’s socio-cultural roles.17 In
The Odd Women, defunct notions of womanhood are centralized
through the lives of the Madden sisters—Alice, Virginia, and Monica.
The two former, impoverished and fraught, rest their financial hopes
in their youngest sister: “She must marry; of course she must marry!

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Her sisters gladdened in the thought.”18 Monica’s eventual marriage

to Edmund Widdowson, however, tells a cringe-worthy tale of suffocat-
ing overprotectiveness,19 particularly through his unease as she social-
izes within more progressive London circles. Monica’s reading, and the
reading of those by whom she is influenced, becomes a means through
which Gissing examines the socio-cultural value of books according to
the young, middle-class women for whom they were regulated.

Generational Distinction in The Odd Women Readers

The Odd Women’s reconsideration of the woman reader is accom-
plished through an intertextuality that assembles the broad array
of texts available to women at the turn-of-the-century. The books to
which Monica is exposed are incredibly diverse: she might choose from
religious verse, a canonical Scott novel, a New Woman novel, or an
unknown paperback, depending on her inclinations. Her intellectual
choices are influenced by a comparably diverse array of readers. She
associates with two distinct generations of readers: Dr. Madden, Alice
Madden, and Edmund Widdowson—outdated, mid-century readers who
advocate literature as a vehicle of moral education and regulation—
and Rhoda Nunn, a new reader who resists books with conventional
cultural value and achieves countercultural realizations through new
literature. Virginia Madden, a conflicted reader, is unable to achieve
meaning within either mid-century or turn-of-the-century reading
tides, and thus delineates a third class of reader who is unable to cope
with shifting cultural values. The intellectual range accrues tension
to the question of how Monica, a typical, young middle-class woman—
neither overtly conservative nor progressive—declares her subjective
intellectual ambitions within a transitioning literary culture.
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The novel’s first chapter frames its continuing focus on generational

opposition through the delineation of Dr. Madden’s education of his
daughters. Dr. Madden practices the standard Victorian tradition of
reading aloud to his daughters and his preference for Coleridge and
Tennyson indicate popular Victorian reading choices. In the novel’s
opening scene, his choice to read Tennyson’s “The Lotus Eaters” (1832)
suggests Dr. Madden’s desire to instill moral obedience in his daugh-
ters; the act of reading becomes a mode of family censorship and con-
trol.20 The attempt to uniformly educate his daughters according to a
traditional Victorian patriarchal upbringing is Gissing’s first clue into

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the intellectual conflicts particular to the historical moment: The Odd

Women timeline begins in 1872, two years after The Elementary Edu-
cation Act of 1870 made education compulsory for children between the
ages of five and thirteen in England. Alice, the eldest Madden sister, is
nineteen in 1872 and too old to be affected by the Act, whereas Monica,
the youngest, is five and receives the education guaranteed by the Act.
Monica is cast as belonging to a new intellectual generation, separate
from her sisters and father. The death of Dr. Madden in the first chap-
ter, however, signifies an early divergence from a patriarchal Victorian
education21 and an entrance into a culture of conflicting tastes, opin-
ions, and identities that crowd the duration of the novel. The Madden
sisters’ early egress from a standard Victorian education aligns mid-
century Victorian values with dying modes of social control, and the
intellectual culture that they confront following their father’s death
as a progressive, post-patriarchal order that they are left to navigate.
Gissing utilizes a popular mid-Victorian religious text, John Keble’s
The Christian Year; thoughts in verse for the Sundays and holydays
throughout the year (1827), as a tidy symbol to negotiate how texts’ val-
ues differ according to generationally distinct readers. The book, which
includes a poem corresponding to each Sunday, and additional holi-
days, of the liturgical year of the Church of England, was enormously
popular in Victorian England. It ran through 158 editions by the time
its copyright had expired in 1873. The Madden sisters would certainly
have been well-acquainted with the text; it is referred to both by its
title and simply as “Keble” or “Keble’s work,”22 signaling its familiar-
ity to Victorian readers and, similarly, to the Madden sisters. Alice and
Virginia purchase the book as a birthday gift for Monica, revealing
the traditional Victorian morality that they envision for their younger
sister. However, the intended value is appreciated by only the older
generation of readers. Both Alice and Widdowson value the text’s re-
storative properties: “Alice turned over ‘The Christian Year,’ and en-
deavoured to console herself out of it, while her sister prepared the
meal,” and Widdowson recalls his mother reading it aloud on Sundays.
Virginia, conversely, attends to the book’s cultural, rather than moral
value. When she purchases it in a Strand bookshop, she rejoices that a
“presentable copy of Keble’s work cost less than she had imagined.”23
Aware of its popularity, Virginia desires to gift a copy that is materially
admirable. Gissing complicates Keble’s moral value with its material

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meaning within a market-driven literary economy, suggesting unstable

value across generations.
Monica distances herself from her sisters’ moral and social values
when she is presented with The Christian Year. She feigns a sense of
excitement when receiving it: “What a nice ‘Christian Year’! I’ll do my
best to read some of it now and then.”24 Her promise to try to read it
occasionally is hardly an exclamation of gratitude; this lack of enthu-
siasm for the orthodox mid-century text demonstrates Monica’s poten-
tial for discontinuation—although reserved and polite—of past intel-
lectual values. Monica’s disregard for Keble presents her as a character
who cares little for intellectual exertion or, more acutely, a character
who recognizes little use in the intellectual culture of outmoded gen-
erations. Indeed, Monica’s reaction to the text complicates critical un-
derstandings of her compliance with domestic norms25 and reveals her
early unrest with others’ desires that she perform these norms. In-
stead, the text becomes a material stand-in for the expectations that
Monica hopes to resist. She carries the package to her first meeting
with Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn, hoping to place in their training
school: “Drawing nearer to Queen’s Road—the wrapped up Keble in
her hand—she began to wonder whether Miss Nunn would have any
serious proposal to offer.”26 The package is a material reminder of the
conservative culture within which Monica was raised and emphasizes
the tension between this past and the progressive future to which she
aspires. Furthermore, the comparison of Alice, Virginia, and Monica’s
handling of Keble underscore Gissing’s notions of the flexible and mu-
table qualities of print: meaning, he shows, is not dependent on text
alone, but rather on the interrelation of individual reader, text, and
form.
Keble frames a generational division in reading that is continually
exaggerated throughout the novel, emphasizing the intellectual con-
flict that Monica faces. Gissing targets Alice and Widdowson as rem-
nants of a Victorian intellectual culture that has become stultifying
and constrictive by the 1880s. Alice, for example, reads “for the twen-
tieth time a few volumes in her possession—poetry, popular history,
and half a dozen novels such as the average mother of children would
have approved in the governess’s hands.”27 Alice’s reading choices rein-
force conventional mid-century morality: she remains enclosed within

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an historical and literary landscape of rehearsed dictums. Her reading

tastes are similar to that of conventional advice given for attributes
of a governess, as suggested in the chapter on governesses in Jane
Ellen Panton’s 1896 A Gentlewoman’s Home: she “should have read
Dickens and ­Thackeray, Walter Scott and Jane Austen … she should
like to read poetry, she should not understand what ‘decadent’ and
fin-de-siècle mean.”28 “Proper” reading in this case is an antidote to
­turn-of-the-century cultural shifts. As Alice reads and rereads canoni-
cal mid-century fiction, she becomes both isolated and outmoded in fin-
de-siècle London.
Monica’s marriage to Widdowson, though, exacerbates how women
continue to be guided by a male intellectual culture that constricted
individual ambitions. Widdowson, an “oldish man, with grizzled whis-
kers,”29 contrasts the twenty-one-year-old Monica both physically and
intellectually. He prefers to read works of political economy and his-
tory, such as historian Henry Hallam,30 and he is particularly criticized
for his elevation of literature’s material value: the “several hundred
volumes of English literature” displayed in his library are “supposed
to be indispensable to a well-informed man, though very few men even
make a pretense of reading them.”31 He uses his objective and immuta-
ble notions of knowledge, furthermore, in attempts to “correct” Monica.
Alice and Widdowson exist as Monica’s pseudo mother/father figures,
attempting to guide her with the literature they present to her. Just
as Alice gifts her The Christian Year, Widdowson reads aloud to her
because like “most men of his kind, he viewed religion as a precious
and powerful instrument for directing the female conscience.” G ­ issing
further ridicules this viewpoint when Widdowson recommends she
read John Ruskin because “every word he says about women is good
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and precious.”32 The fleeting contemporary prestige of both religious

texts and Ruskin’s teachings frame Widdowson as restrictive, rather
than learned or stoic. Shortly after he recommends Ruskin to Monica,
a new, starkly different intellectual culture is fleetingly noted with ref-
erence to the New Woman writer Ouida: “Did you ever read any of
Ouida’s novels?” Widdowson’s friend asks him when Monica asks to
travel abroad: “[S]he writes a great deal about those parts.”33 On one
hand, the reference acknowledges the enclosed networks of Victorian
literary cultures: a husband who recommends Ruskin to his wife would
probably not be familiar with Ouida’s writings. Additionally, the refer-

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ence suggests the conflicting intellectual values that inform Monica:

the conservatism of her husband and an increasingly codified trans-
gressive culture at the turn of the century.
The conflict Monica faces is not a simple turn from mid-century to
fin-de-siècle fiction and a break from a restrictive ideology. Gissing’s
depiction of reading culture is ideologically complex: although at once
progressive in his ridicule of Widdowson he is seemingly conservative
in the desultory relationship that Virginia holds with reading. The
middle Madden sister, Virginia, is generationally caught betwixt Alice’s
domestic conservatism and
Monica’s progressive leanings
and unable to reconcile her
ideologies through reading. In-
stead, she experiences the type
of mental downfall from read-
ing that contemporary critics
frequently warned against.
Her zealous and “disinterest-
ed” study of ecclesiastical his-
tory is said to have caused a
mental breakdown, after which
she lost “all power of giving her
mind to anything but feebler
fiction.”34 Flint reads Virginia’s
consumption of fiction as com-
parable to her alcoholism and
foreboding Monica’s eventual
turn to fiction.35 The episode Fig. 1
might rather be understood “Donna Quixote”
as an example of how not to Punch, 28 April 1894
read, rather than a wholesale
­critique of fiction. Virginia embodies, unequivocally, contemporary as-
sumptions about the effect of fiction on women’s mental health, but
Gissing critiques the mode of access—zealous and rapid study—over
content. Empty reading, he suggests, is dangerous, rather than the fic-
tion itself.

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 SHAND : GISSING

Rhoda Nunn, on the other hand, is the unequivocal New Woman of the
novel whose reading invigorates rather than deadens her intellectual
cause. She follows a decidedly anti-traditional and a ­ nti-establishment
mode of reading, entirely resisting contemporary depictions of the wom-
an reader. Rhoda suggests that one way in which women might resist
intellectual restraints is by educating themselves within an entirely
separate intellectual culture. She reads from a “bookcase full of works
on the Woman Question and allied topics [that] served as a circulating
library” and “a volume of essays dealing with the relations between the
sexes in a very modern spirit.”36 While no authors are explicitly named,
a reader can imagine the intellectual culture—from Wollstonecraft, to
Eliot, to Nightingale—that Rhoda educates herself with. Rhoda’s read-
ing is a recategorization of literature to access an alternate history
and propagate a resistant notion of femininity. The scene echoes an
1889 Englishwoman’s Review article, “Women’s Books—A Possible Li-
brary.”37 In it, author Helen Blackburn ponders what a woman’s li-
brary would look like—collecting works from female novelists, poets,
travel writers, translators, philosophers, historians, and economists, as
well as periodicals edited by women. The vision was realized in her
“Memorial Library,” consisting of “works on women’s questions.”38 The
parallel terminology that describes Blackburn’s and Rhoda’s librar-
ies links Rhoda’s reading to a distinctly feminist tradition emerging
toward the close of the nineteenth-century, one concerned exclusively
with women’s writers and memorializing a female literary tradition.
Gissing’s admittance of Rhoda’s intellectual vigor departs from con-
temporary characterization of the New Woman, suggesting a sympa-
thetic alliance with women’s social resistance. Rhoda’s deep invest-
ment in her texts builds this sympathy. Her reading habits counters
the dominant conception of New Women’s literary consumption that
was intimately tied to their image. Punch’s 1894 “Donna Quixote”
(Fig. 1), for example, captions that she has been led astray by “a world
of disorderly notions picked out of books,” and the poster advertising
Sidney Grundy’s 1894 play The New Woman pictures a disheveled
young woman with papers and books scattered around her, imaging
intellectual aspirations tempered by an unkempt and disordered na-
ture (Fig. 2).

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Mockery of the New Woman is intimately tied to socio-cultural anxi-

ety. The Odd Women’s characterization of Rhoda is far from mockery;
she is a serious and substantial interjection against past modes of
thought enabled by her categorical study of an alternate literary his-
tory. Gissing’s counter-depiction of New Women reading more widely
intimates a critique of the mode in which women are assumed to access
fiction. The depiction of Rhoda foreshadows Monica’s declamatory use
of fiction by suggesting that
to break from intellectual ste-
reotypes, the woman reader
must combat cultural concep-
tions of how women read and
value fiction.
Opposed to Rhoda, M­ onica’s
relation to radical womanhood
is ambiguous and her reading
is testament to the identity
conflict posed to middle-class
female readers: to read fiction
was to be modern but simul-
taneously subversive. The
pseudo-parental influence of
Alice and Widdowson, the ex-
ample of Virginia, and the al-
lure of Rhoda offer contradict-
ing intellectual models. Still, Fig. 2
Monica is a, “pretty, cheerful, The New Woman Poster
engaging girl”39 whose best By Albert George Morrow, 1894
[185.194.8.251] Project MUSE (2025-03-02 23:30 GMT)

prospects are supposed to lie

in marriage, and her sisters place their own well-being in their young-
est sister’s future in marriage. Monica’s domestic identity is an im-
perative, but her own interests wander toward the ideologies posed
by Rhoda and the progressive Cosgroves. Among the potential intel-
lectual networks she may traverse, Monica must first declare her dis-
tance from domestic assumptions. Monica’s novel-reading resolves a
very precise identity conflict in a transitional English culture: she is at
once expected to fulfill the traditional domestic role of a young woman
by marrying well but is simultaneously a thoroughly modern woman

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exposed to the cultural sensibilities of fin-de-siècle London. Her inter-

action with fiction diversifies critical understanding of how women
readers utilized the content of their reading material: while “reading
was often the vehicle through which an individual’s sense of identity
was achieved or confirmed,”40 it was also the vehicle through which
identities were ­rejected.

“What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists?”

The contemporary debate over novel-reading is most prominently
raised in The Odd Women through Rhoda’s diatribe against romantic
fiction. Spurred by a disagreement over whether or not to accept Bella
Roytson, abandoned after a romantic affair, to her and Mary Barfoot’s
secretarial school, this lambast of romantic fiction emphasizes Rhoda’s
militant opinions on female education, while echoing contemporary
concerns about the effect of romantic fiction on women:
All her spare time was given to novel-reading. If every novelist could be
strangled and thrown into the sea we should have some chance of reform-
ing women. The girl’s nature was corrupted with sentimentality, like that
of all but every woman who is intelligent enough to read what is called the
best fiction, but not intelligent enough to understand its vice…. What is
more vulgar than the ideal of novelists? They won’t represent the actual
world; it would be too dull for their readers…. This Miss Royston—when
she rushed off to perdition, ten to one she had in mind some idiot heroine
of a book.41

Rhoda blames Miss Royston’s romantic illusions on the typical plot of

a romance novel, and extends the question of whether Gissing allies
with Rhoda’s critique of the genre. Monica’s narrative, however, cannot
mimic Royston’s unless it is true that all women interact with texts in
identical ways—an assertion that the exploration of reading within
The Odd Women rejects. Rhoda’s diatribe, rather, underscores the in-
tensity and complexity of debates surrounding women’s reading and
exacerbates the tension that prefaces Monica’s turn to fiction. Despite
the sympathy with which Gissing frames Rhoda’s intellectual vigor,
she is nonetheless an exaggerated type, unwilling to compromise her
ideals of a reformed womanhood. Rhoda’s militant New Woman stance
extends little sympathy to the ideological conflict that Monica faces.
Rather than grappling with this complexity, critics tend to agree with
Rhoda, arguing that the Royston narrative parallels Monica’s turn
to fiction because her reading causes her to figure Bevis as a roman-

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tic hero.42 Such an analysis of Monica’s reading does not consider her
consistent, if not explicit, discontinuation of a conservative Victorian
­social order and assumes the conventional and stable categorization of
popular fiction as “bad.”
Instead, Monica’s turn to fiction centralizes the “rhetorical effect of
form”43 and particularly its meanings within the changing tide of Vic-
torian literature. If literary form effects meaning44 and form itself em-
bodies historical transitions,45 then what meaning might literary form
elicit when totally divorced from text? In Monica’s case, the social sig-
nificance of the yellow-back novel amplifies her association with it as
an act of dissent. When Lady Laura Ridding warns against “the straw-
berry ices on every railway bookstall,” she is most likely referencing
yellow-back covers—cheap paperback novels with brightly colored cov-
ers. Monica is able to peruse some during her and ­Widdowson’s vaca-
tion because their low cost made them disposable objects for travelers
wanting a quick, entertaining read. To both Monica and ­Widdowson,
the cultural signification of the yellow-back transforms it into a sign
of dissent: a flag that, if yielded, pushed the handler further from
­mid-century Victorian morality and closer to a supposed degenerate
modernity. Monica and Widdowson’s first prolonged and impassioned
argument about their marriage is instigated by a disagreement over
what Monica should be reading—a yellow-back novel or Sir Walter
Scott’s Guy Mannering, or, the Astrologer (1815)—showing Gissing’s
keen awareness of the social significance of the disparaged yellow-back
form:
Monica first of all wrote a letter to her sister; then, as it was still impos-
sible to go out, she took up one of the volumes that lay on a side-table in
the sitting room, novels left by former lodgers. Her choice was something
or other with yellow back. Widdowson, watching all her movements fur-
tively, became aware of the pictured cover.
“I don’t think you’ll get much good out of that,” he remarked, after one or
two efforts to speak.
“No harm, at all events,” she replied good humoredly.
“I’m not so sure. Why would you waste your time? Take ‘Guy Mannering,’
if you want a novel.”
“I’ll see how I like this first.”
He felt himself powerless, and suffered acutely from the thought that
­Monica was in rebellion against him.”46

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The book’s socio-cultural meaning is put to advantageous use in

­Monica’s hands. Her response supporting her choice of the yellow-back
novel is simple—“I’ll see how I like this first”—but is amplified by the
book in her hand.
Monica’s statement declares her independence in marriage and
marks one of the tenser interchanges in the novel. Widdowson under-
stands her action as rebellion. In this instance, the book-object becomes
oppositional, thwarting expectations and restraints placed on women’s
reading, and claiming a mode of gratification ordinarily denied to wom-
en.47 Monica accords with a consistent pattern of women’s reading as
a rebellious assertion of subjectivity: “The act of reading for women is
often an assertion of individuality, a separation from societal restric-
tions and expectations,” or what Janice Radway terms her “declaration
of independence.”48 In Monica’s case, though, it is not only the act of
reading but the form of the book that acts as her declaration, demand-
ing her separation from societal restrictions. The act, furthermore, is
more dissent than it is liberation, aggressively rendering Widdowson
“powerless.” Still, Monica’s ability to declare her allegiance to what
Widdowson deems vulgar through the cultural meaning of a yellow-
back novel enables a protest that she might not otherwise speak or
act. In doing so, she declares her desires and distances herself from a
domestic feminine ideology.
After Monica’s declaration, Gissing continues to appropriate the so-
cial significance of popular fiction in order to upend its gendered as-
sociations. Reading against the conventional association of romance
fiction as feminine,49 Gissing reveals that sentimental reading might
also be practiced by men, further insisting on the impossibility of as-
sumptions about literary form, readers, and value. As Monica turns
[185.194.8.251] Project MUSE (2025-03-02 23:30 GMT)

more and more to fiction, she simultaneously entertains a romantic

affair with an acquaintance, Bevis. Gissing’s critical weight falls on
Bevis’s self-identification as a romantic hero rather than on Monica’s
romanticization of him, further complicating criticism that blames
Monica and her turn fiction. Bevis certainly takes pleasure in courting
Monica, but does not reflect realistically on the result of their intimacy,
and instead self-identifies as a novelized dandy. After deceiving her to
come to his apartment alone, he insists: “But, Mrs. Widdowson, I am go-
ing to make you a cup of tea—with my own fair hands, as the novelists

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say.”50 Monica’s plan to run away with Bevis, although wrapped in the
conceit of a romantic plot, is founded in an assertive desire to escape
Widdowson and claim a new life for herself; for Bevis, the courtship is
little more than play.
It is seemingly only after Monica radicalizes herself through literary
form, and after she dismisses hollowed romantic illusions convention-
ally associated with women’s fiction reading, that she augments the ob-
ject-value of books with their intellectual value. Monica’s progression
suggests a plurality of meaning that might be utilized through books
and distinguishes between the formal protest against femininity that
she initially practices and the extended philosophical or intellectual
dismantling that follows. Reading is, on one level, Monica’s s­ olace dur-
ing times of unhappiness: she “found more attraction in books as her
life grew more unhappy.” When her access to books increases upon a
subscription to Mudie’s, though, reading becomes a process of meaning-
making:
Though with reluctance Widdowson had consented to a subscription at
Mudie’s, and from the new catalogues she either chose for herself, neces-
sarily at random, or by the advice of better-read people, such as she met at
Mrs. Cosgrove’s. What modern teaching was to be got from these volumes
she readily absorbed. She sought for opinions and arguments which were
congenial to her mood of discontent, all but of revolt.
Sometimes the perusal of a love-story embittered her lot to the last point
of endurance.51

Monica is both a passive student, newly indoctrinated into a progres-

sive ideology, and an active participant, seeking to resound her own
unrest in others’ thoughts. Romance fiction, too, emboldens her rather
than servicing any sentimentality. Rather than assuming that the dif-
ferent types of reading contradict each other,52 Gissing purposely con-
flates the diverse texts that Monica accesses—from forwardly feminist
texts to three-decker novels to sensation fiction—granting agency to
Monica’s interaction with the text. In doing so, he contests the limited
modes of engagement assumed to be associated with certain literary
forms: romance, for example, might be just as intellectually stimulat-
ing as philosophy, depending on the reader’s engagement. As a self-
made reader, Monica can now independently select and assess books in
order to generate individual meaning.

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Monica’s purposeful reading counters the sort of disinterested read-

ing demonstrated through Virginia. More assertive of her progressive
identity, Monica’s goal is now more similar to Rhoda’s: she must make
meaning for herself in an intellectual market otherwise ignorant of her
desires. Gayle Greene’s discussion of feminist metafiction, although
she applies it to postwar texts, proves helpful in discussing Monica’s de-
velopment: the “protagonist looks to the literary tradition for answers
about the present, speculates about the relations of the ‘forms’ to her
life and her writing, seeks ‘an ending of her own’ which differs from the
marriage or death to which she is traditionally consigned, and seeks
freedom from the plots of the past.”53 Monica seeks to understand her
trajectory through the texts with which she interacts. Literary form
itself is the tool through which she declares her own relation to the
present and through which she finds the space to absorb and seek al-
ternate intellectual models. Monica’s explicit utilization of novels to
claim a different life for herself prove her to belong to a new woman-
hood, though not an explicit New Woman, who demands independence
of mind and choice. Co-aligned with her turn to fiction, Monica sepa-
rates from Widdowson and breaks from the threat of domesticity.
Her death in the final chapter complicates an easy categorization of
Monica, and The Odd Women in general, as a hopeful portrayal of wom-
en’s progress. The death does, though, reinforce Gissing’s emphasis on
multi-generational interrelations and their socio-historic significance.
Monica’s death parallels that of her father in the first chapter, and al-
though Dr. Madden’s death suggests the demise of patriarchal familial
rule, Monica’s death suggests the demise of a patriarchal influence that
she struggled to wrest herself from. Indeed, the novel closes with a gen-
erational emphasis that falls decidedly toward women’s future. Rhoda
sits with Monica’s new-born daughter and sighs: “Poor little child!”54 In
one sense, the novel ends with even the most radical woman nurturing
a child, echoing Lady Jeune’s prediction that motherhood “will save the
New Woman from her impossible and ridiculous position.”55 However,
Gissing’s critique of Rhoda and dismissal of Monica’s progress is not
so sudden or absolute. Transition—of femininity and of print culture—
grounds The Odd Women’s sympathy in a hopeful future evolving from
the conflicted present and problematic past.

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§ § §
This analysis of readers in The Odd Women is not exhaustive but it
puts into focus the importance of reading within the social milieu of
the story, the relation between material form and social significance,
and the social degradation of cheap fiction at the close of the nine-
teenth century—how it levies the symbolic power for Monica to declare
her disavowal of conventional femininity. The Odd Women delineates a
very particular, transitional moment in book history when the material
form of print was imbued with conflicting and unsteadied social values:
social degradation to one reader or critic presented social rebellion to
another. As we have seen, Monica’s reading habits contribute to the
contested field of Gissing’s gender politics. His paradoxical relationship
with women’s progress rests in the contradiction between his assertion
of the “crass imbecility of the typical women”56 and his professed de-
sires for improvements in women’s education.57 Gissing’s depictions of
women’s reading further the ideological complexity that informed and
refracted such supposedly stable categories in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. Shifts in literary production and consumption increasingly codi-
fied multiple ideologies and opened opportunities to challenge, explore,
and embrace social identities. Through the depiction of contemporary
print and reading culture, Gissing complicates categorical approaches
to the woman reader and multiplies the ways that women might read
and by extension think, desire, and act.
The gender-political framework that defines the study of late-nine-
teenth-century print culture and reading history is in the process of
­being renegotiated. The Odd Women deconstructs women’s relation-
ship to print culture, complicating the typical depiction of women read-
ing passively, superficially, or in isolation. It insists women might con-
[185.194.8.251] Project MUSE (2025-03-02 23:30 GMT)

sciously read as part of a social movement. The elevation of the mate-

rial meaning of books emphasizes not only the manner in which books
are consumed but how they are used. Leah Price identifies “nonread-
ing” as any use of a book exempt from reading its text, notably when a
“book’s material properties trump its textual content.”58
Material meaning takes on a gender-political dimension in The Odd
Women, positing an important link between Victorian feminist and
material studies. Monica’s protest emphasizes that women could ma-
nipulate and control material forms in a way that they may not neces-

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sarily be able to control textual content. The interrelation of shifting

states of Victorian media in The Odd Women underscores the role that
countercultures play in accruing new literary forms with meaning and
value. Working within the complexities of this transition, discourse
on the woman reader must consider how the transition of the book
form allowed women to self-consciously resist, rupture, and reform a
received intellectual culture.

Notes
1. David Grylls, The Paradox of Gissing (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 162.
2. See, in particular, Frederick Nesta, “The Myth of the ‘Triple-Headed Monster’: The Eco-
nomics of the Three-Volume Novel,” Publishing History, 61 (2007), 47–69. Nesta uses Gissing’s
letters and New Grub Street to demonstrate his concern with the economic factors leading to
single-volume novels in the 1890s, and its attendant effect on authorship. Mary Hammond,
too, finds that Gissing “engages overtly and deliberately with a major late-nineteenth-century
debate about books, readers and reading.” See Mary Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the
Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 23.
3. The end of the century saw a rapid increase in print production, literacy, and availability
of books. During this time, novel production nearly doubled from nine hundred new novels
produced annually in 1875 to 1,618 annually in 1914 (Hammond, 4).
4. Women’s reading was perceived as a threat to women’s domestic role by stimulating her
imagination and individual desires. See “Theory and Women’s Reading,” in Kate Flint, The
Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); and Belinda Jack, The Woman Reader
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), for criticism of women’s reading in the nineteenth
century.
5. Christina Ceron, “‘What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists?’ The Metaliterary
Ghost in The Odd Women,” George Gissing and the Woman Question: Convention and Dissent,
Simon J. James and Christine Huguet, eds. (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 128.
6. Lise Shapiro Sanders, “The Failures of the Romance: Boredom, Class and Desire in
George Gissing’s The Odd Women and W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage,” Modern
Fiction Studies, 47.1 (2001), 194; and Marisa Palacios Knox, “The Valley of the Shadow of the
Books: George Gissing, New Women, and Morbid Literary Detachment,” Nineteenth-Century
Literature, 69.1 (2013), 109.
7. Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914, 269.
8. See, in particular, Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
­(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1–11.
9. Jennifer Phegley, Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Maga-
zines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004). 13.
10. Paul Fyfe, “The Random Selection of Victorian New Media” (Van Arsdel Graduate Stu-
dent Essay Prize), Victorian Periodicals Review, 42.1 (2009), documents periodicals’ use of sci-
entific rhetoric to described increases in print.
11. Phegley, Educating the Proper Woman Reader, 3.
12. Mrs. Hon. Joyce, “Need of a Mothers’ Union in all Classes,” Mothers in Council (Wells
Gardner, Darton, and Co., 1893), 113.

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13. Lady Laura Ridding, “What Should Women Read?” Women at Home, 37 (1896), 29.
14. Lucy Helen Muriel Soulsby, Stray thoughts on reading (London: Longman’s, Green &
Co., 1897), 1.
15. See, particularly, Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing
Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); New Media, 1740–
1915, Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003); and Lisa
Gitleman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2006).
16. Gitelman, Always Already New, 6.
17. James L. Machor, Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the
Contexts of Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 68.
18. George Gissing, The Odd Woman (New York: Penguin Classics, 1983), 12.
19. See Diedre David, “Ideologies of Patriarchy, Feminism, and Fiction in The Odd Women,”
Feminist Studies, 10.1 (1984), 117–39. Davis asserts that Monica’s marriage is part of Gissing’s
delineation of women’s struggle for existence: “Marriage into suffocating respectability is the
only way out” (122).
20. See Jack, The Woman Reader, 244.
21. David, “Ideologies of Patriarchy, Feminism, and Fiction in The Odd Women,” 117.
22. Gissing, The Odd Woman, 13, 37, 19.
23. Ibid., 20, 46, 19.
24. Ibid., 31.
25. Sanders, “The Failures of the Romance,” 196.
26. Gissing, The Odd Woman, 37.
27. Ibid., 14.
28. Jane Ellen Panton, A Gentlewoman’s House: The Whole Art of Building, Furnishing,
and Beautifying the Home (London: “The Gentlewoman” Office, Arundel Street, Strand, W. C.,
1896), 322.
29. Gissing, The Odd Woman, 34.
30. Gissing, The Odd Woman, 377. Henry Hallam (1777–1859) is best known for his histori-
cal scholarship, including View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818) and The
Constitutional History of England from the accession of Henry VII to the death of George II
(1827).
31. Gissing, The Odd Woman, 175.
32. Ibid., 175, 173. He is most likely recommending Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies and its essay
“Of Queen’s Gardens” (1865), which recommends a female education suited to women’s domes-
tic role.
33. Gissing, The Odd Woman, 180.
34. Ibid., 14.
35. Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914, 269.
36. Gissing, The Odd Woman, 60, 166.
37. Helen Blackburn, “Women’s Books—A Possible Library, The Englishwoman’s Review, 15
May 1889, 193.
38. Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928
(London: Routledge, 2002), 61.
39. Gissing, The Odd Woman, 12.
40. Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914, 14.

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41. Gissing, The Odd Woman, 64.

42. See Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914, 268; Knox, “The Valley of the Shadow of the
Books,” 109.
43. Joshua Calhoun, “The World Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poet-
ics of Paper,” PMLA, 126.2 (2011), 328.
44. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1986), 13.
45. Gitelman Always Already New, 4.
46. Gissing, The Odd Woman, 187.
47. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
­(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 211.
48. Phegley, Educating the Proper Woman Reader, 5; see Radway, Reading the Romance:
Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, 213.
49. Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–
1914, 5–6.
50. Gissing, The Odd Woman, 237.
51. Ibid., 237, 231.
52. Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914, 269.
53. Gayle Green, “Ambiguous Benefits: Reading and Writing in Feminist Metafiction,” in
Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, Carol J. Singley,
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 315.
54. Gissing, The Odd Woman, 386.
55. Lady Jeune, “The New Woman and the Old: A Reply to Sarah Grand,” The Lady’s Realm
(London: Hutchinson and Co., 1898), 603.
56. Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas, eds., The Collected Letters of
George Gissing (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994), V: 113.
57. Grylls overviews the contradictions in Gissing’s gender politics, calling him “a woman-
worshipping misogynist with an interest in female emancipation” (141). Karen Chase, too,
acknowledges his unresolved place as both “a protofeminist and a misogynist” in “The Literal
Heroine: A Study of Gissing’s The Odd Women,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the
Arts, 26.3 (1984), 231.
58. Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, 8.

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