Oddities in Gissing’s The Odd Women

Abstract

George Gissing's The Odd Women is one of the truly great novels of nineteenth-century fiction. Its prose is delicious: every observation bursts with keen discrimination and finely weighted feeling, qualities counterbalanced by a delicate irony that caresses the narrative. It achieves the combination of empathy and detach- ment so necessary to the best of novels, all the while adhering to a style that is obstinately plain and simple. Yet there are also a handful of key moments when the prose deviates from its austere simplicity, when it conspicuously deploys tropes such as repeti- tion and syntactic reversal to achieve startling effects—oddities, we might call them. Such moments warrant further scrutiny, for they bear directly on our understanding of the novel. 1 The novel's heroine is Rhoda Nunn, a thirty-one-year-old woman who manages a typing school and strives to inculcate its female students with principles of independent living. Rhoda lives with Mary Barfoot, the school's philanthropic patron, and the novel's plot is set in motion when Mary introduces Rhoda to her cousin, Everard Barfoot, a man who, at age thirty-three, has abandoned his career in civil engineering to pursue a life of leisurely travel. Mary herself hasn't seen him for years, and when he reappears she immediately notices a telling detail: