In my last post I wrote about the transitional world of work for women in 1880. The beginning of what might be seen as a widening of the career base of women, a realisation that lack of economic opportunities for women to earn their own livings was forcing them to enter into sterile, unhappy marriages deeply unsatisfying to all concerned.
Separately, there were growing fears that work in education, the only respectable option for middle-class, was leading to women entering the profession who were unsuitable with poor outcomes both for women themselves and their charges.
Into this world comes George Gissing’s extremely interesting novel ‘The Odd Women’ published in 1893. Gissing’s complex relationships, brief spell in prison and financial problems have somehow left him a little beyond the mainstream. But ‘The Odd Women’ is a fine novel on a complex issue of the role of women in the economy as the nineteenth century drew to a close. The novel opens with a widowed country doctor, comfortable off and hoping for greater affluence, walking with the oldest of his six daughters,
“So to-morrow, Alice,’ said Dr Madden as he walked with his eldest daughter on the coast-downs by Clevedon, ‘I shall take step for insuring my life for a thousand pounds.”
But the doctor is killed in an accident that very night.
Fifteen years later and three of the sisters are dead. As we follow the three remaining sisters through the book we see the dilemmas faced by women with breeding but insufficient fortunes. Two are condemned to work as companions and governesses for which they are wholly unsuited, their health, physical and mental, deteriorating rapidly. The youngest and prettiest is condemned to shop-work, enters a loveless marriage with an older man for economic reasons, triggering a catastrophic series of events for them all.
As a vivid counterpoint to this unsatisfactory wastefulness of the energies and skills of these women, we are offered Miss Barfoot and Miss Nunn who open a college. They offered middle-class girls who must make their own economic way in the world, typing and similar skills to meet a new world of work for women.
An interesting read.
The Solitary Reader 