4.0
The Odd Women
ByPublisher Description
When their father’s death leaves them with no money and a dim future, the Madden sisters, Alice, Virginia, and Monica, must negotiate the gender roles and class constraints of Victorian London in the 1890s. Virginia and Alice have aged out of the possibility of marriage and seemingly the idea of love itself and find themselves with few prospects and little hope. Remaindered in the marriage equation, these “odd women” face a great deal of scrutiny, stigma, and social pressure—it’s at this time that Rhoda Nunn, childhood friend to the Madden sisters, arrives in London to challenge accepted norms and mores around the role of women in society. Rhoda’s strong feminist passion draws a sharp contrast to the middle-class respectability of the Madden sisters’ upbring, as the sisters watch a new world emerge around them. Hailed as a prescient and boldly political novel of the early feminist movement, Gissing’s The Odd Women captures all of the absurdity, brutality, and even comedy of Victorian attitudes around gender and class, and the brilliant women who dared to be odd and to conceive of their role in society beyond their value on the marriage market.
Download the free Fable app
Stay organized
Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.
Build a better TBR
Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool
Rate and review
Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags
Curate your feed
Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesStay organized
Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.Build a better TBR
Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building toolRate and review
Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tagsCurate your feed
Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Odd Women Reviews
4.0
okmutiny
Created 8 months agoShare
Report
About George Gissing
George Gissing (1857-1903) was an English novelist, who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. Meagrely successful in his lifetime, he had by the 1940s been recognised as a literary genius, with George Orwell pronouncing that "England has produced few better novelists".
Other books by George Gissing
Merve Emre
Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and a contributing writer at the New Yorker.
Other books by Merve Emre
Adam Dalva
Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic. He serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University. His graphic novel, Olivia Twist, was published by Dark Horse in 2019. Adam was previously a judge of the 2022 Story Prize, the Books Editor of Words Without Borders, and the Senior Fiction Editor of Guernica.
Allison Miriam Smith
Allison Miriam Smith is a co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. She is also an Acquiring Editor and Publishing & Publicity Manager for Unnamed Press. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she was an assistant curator for the USC Doheny Library George Cassady Lewis Carroll Special Collection. She later went on to earn a Masters in 18th & 19th c. Literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, working nights at the library. Before Unnamed Press, she was a bookseller Skylight Books in Los Angeles, CA.
Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is an Acquiring Editor at Unnamed Press and co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics.
Other books by Brandon Taylor
Start a Book Club
Start a public or private book club with this book on the Fable app today!FAQ
Do I have to buy the ebook to participate in a book club?
Why can’t I buy the ebook on the app?
How is Fable’s reader different from Kindle?
Do you sell physical books too?
Are book clubs free to join on Fable?
How do I start a book club with this book on Fable?
