The Odd Women has four entwining stories, two of them focused on women in relation to one another, two on women in relation to men. The relationships between women are more successful than the heterosexual ones, but in each of these stories there is a balance of suffering and relief.
The first story is that of the Madden sisters, Alice and Virginia and their younger sister Monica, the surviving trio of the original family cluster, women constrained by narrowness of conventional opportunity. George Orwell, commenting on the achievement of the novel at a point when it was out of print, praised Gissing for capturing the dreariness of lower-middle-class life and “the form of self-torture that goes by the name of respectability.” Certainly the Madden sisters are victims of their clinging to middle-class gentility. Gissing portrays their pinched circumstances, their dreary jobs, their fearful reluctance to spend their small capital, which holds them back from their dream of founding a school, their poignant conventional dreams for Monica, and Virginia’s sliding into secret drinking, a strain of the novel that puts Gissing on a par with Emile Zola or Frank Norris in the depiction of dipsomania. Stories of decline have always fascinated me, perhaps because my own family tried so unequivocally to live the counter-narrative to these. My mother told us of her dream in which Karl Marx himself spoke to her and said, “Sheilah, arise, you have nothing to lose but your mediocrity.”
But what if one doesn’t arise? Poor Alice and Virginia don’t give much promise of arising. They decline. Alice has those pimples and her Bible, and Virginia succumbs to her vice. We see her slip from brandy to gin, from the first furtive darts into the railroad station refreshment room to the secret nightly guzzling in her room. At last exposed in all her pathetic drunkenness, Virginia is described as “a feeble, purposeless, hopeless woman, type of a whole class—living to deteriorate.”
Yet despite all this, Alice and Virginia Madden still manage to show that sisterhood is powerful. They may not be Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, but the ties between them that Gissing delineates throughout the novel as well as their connection with Monica—their sister who marries so unhappily—are the underpinning for the hope poignantly expressed in the novel’s ending. Caring for Monica’s baby after its poor mother has died in childbirth, Alice is visited by the novel’s other key female protagonist, Rhoda Nunn. Rhoda notes that Alice seems transformed. Her “complexion was losing its muddiness and spottiness; her step had become light and brisk.” Alice is awaiting the return of Virginia, who is off drying out but hopes to be back soon. As soon as the baby can walk, the sisters plan to open their school for young children.
I had no sisters, but my mother had two, Iris and Sally, the sisters much older than herself, with whom she reestablished contact when I was a teenager and who led what seemed to me modest, respectable lives. Both had married, but I knew them as widows. Iris owned her own small house in the Sussex seaside resort of Hove and was proud her daughter had married a doctor and could go on continental holidays. Sally, the less prosperous, lived in a council basement flat in Brighton with her son Len, the unemployed barber, and had sent her daughter to the same orphanage my mother had been sent to, but she was unfailingly dignified in speech and demeanor. Unlike Alice and Virginia Madden, Iris and Sally were alienated from one another, but, separately, they doted on my mother and were enormously proud of her success. The sense I had of my family as led by women was reinforced by these aunts, who, in their own right, had persevered in the world. There had also been three sons in the family, but two of them were dead, and the third, Meyer, the brother who had revealed my mother’s Jewish past to a London tabloid, was someone we never saw. Whenever, though, we were in England, my mother would take us—once we knew of their existence—to visit her sisters. We would have lunch with one and tea with the other. My mother loved their good Jewish cooking.
That my mother, the youngest of six children in a struggling immigrant family, found better options than Monica Madden, the youngest of the six daughters in The Odd Women, can be attributed to her luck and her spirit, but also to the impact of the first-wave feminists who preceded her. Even less respectable than Monica in origins and early employment (after leaving the orphanage, Lily Shiel worked as a skivvy cleaning a five-story house in Brighton, in a factory where she was fired for dancing in the washroom, and in a department store demonstrating a toothbrush that cleaned only the back of your teeth), she nonetheless could rise to embrace new opportunities. When the toothbrush company, perhaps predictably, went bankrupt, she reviewed the cards left by various men and called upon one whom she remembered as a gentleman. At twenty she married forty-four-year-old John Graham Gillam, a man not so different in age and respectability from Monica’s choice of Edmund Widdowson. But Johnny, unlike the miserably jealous and possessive Widdowson, encouraged the woman now renamed Sheilah Graham to enter the world. To
