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improve her accent and her manners, he sent her to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and she became a chorus girl—a Cochran Young Lady, the British equivalent of the Ziegfield Girls. I have the cup she won as the most beautiful chorus girl of 1927. All this perhaps still fits within familiar paradigms—the stage as a venue for a striking, ambitious young woman. But my mother’s next step seems more remarkable. She began to publish newspaper articles about her chorus girl experience, and soon she left the stage completely for journalism. I am not suggesting she was groundbreaking as a woman in this field—far from it. Women wrote for magazines throughout the nineteenth century; my mother in her orphanage loved reading the “penny dreadfuls” of gossip and advice to girls and women, often penned by women writers. But nineteenth-century women writers were predominantly middle class. My mother’s path to her career from her disadvantaged beginnings, her sense that nothing was closed to her, needs to be linked to the efforts of a sisterhood. This sisterhood surely includes her own two sisters, who must always have hoped for more for her than they realized for themselves. It also includes her sisters in history and in literature, whose efforts and stories changed woman’s lives.

When I try to give a summary description of The Odd Women to someone who doesn’t know it, I say it’s about a heroine who turns down marriage to the hero so that she can continue to run a typing school for women. The wonderfully named Rhoda Nunn, the heroine who engages in an intricate play of passion and sexual politics with her suitor, Everard Barfoot, but ultimately rejects him to continue her work with the typing school, is a quintessential “new woman” of the 1890s. Rhoda strikes me as a kind of gritty poor relation to Isabel Archer. Like Isabel, she values her independence, which in her case she secures by learning shorthand and bookkeeping. (Might not Isabel have been better off to have had such an option?) But Rhoda is distinguished from Isabel in finding a cause beyond the shaping of her personal destiny. By working for the advancement of women, she aligns her life with a great movement. It is no longer enough to say as Jane Eyre does, “I care for myself.” Already Dorothea in Middlemarch understands the need to link her “ardour”—one of Eliot’s favorite words—to something beyond the self, although she can never find what that thing might be. Rhoda has ardor, too. It is outer-directed but at the same time reflects currents of repressed passion in her nature. She makes a cameo appearance in the first chapter as a “thin, eager looking” fifteen-year-old budding bluestocking with a crush on a thirty-five-year-old widower. When she reenters the novel as a rather stern unmarried woman of thirty, working for and with the fortyish Mary Barfoot to run the school, she is in need of some yet-to-be-defined experience to become her best self. But what should that experience be? In her interactions with Mary Barfoot, the center of the second of the novel’s stories “between women,” Mary is the more conventional figure, a kind-hearted idealist, who combines “benevolence with business” and who would take back into the school one of the girls who has “fallen” by living with a married man. She and Rhoda argue about this, and the strain on their friendship when Rhoda’s more puritanical point of view prevails but the girl later kills herself, shows Gissing at his psychologically nuanced best.

Rhoda needs a lover. But here’s the odd twist. She needs him to complete herself; she doesn’t need to marry him. The experience with Barfoot teaches Rhoda what passion is. It gives her the experience of desiring and being desired. She is sincere in her belief that she has found true love. But ultimately Everard Barfoot is expendable, an important passing chapter in the heroine’s progress.

Again, Gissing’s rendering of the dance of calculation and desire between Rhoda and Barfoot strikes me as superb in its understanding of human complexity and perversity. The protagonists contend, each seeking the other’s “unconditional surrender.” He, a freethinker as well as bit of a roué, tries to get her to live with him without marrying; she, in turn, wants to subdue him into an agreement to marry, and she prevails. Brilliantly, the chapter after their engagement begins, “But neither was content.” The fact that shortly they fall out in a misunderstanding about Monica and part is almost inconsequential. Both are too stubborn to put love above pride—or above prejudice. And what could marriage be for them? The travel on the Orient Express that he offers her? What would either of them do when the trip was over? Home for Gissing, as seen most compellingly in the terrible claustrophobic marriage of Monica and Widdowson, has essentially no appeal.

To resolve the conflict between Rhoda and Barfoot, Gissing writes a scene in which Monica, depressed, pregnant, and embarrassed, but eager to clarify that she sought involvement not with Barfoot but with his upstairs neighbor, the callow Bevis, comes to Rhoda to tell her story. The scene is so reminiscent of the one in Middlemarch in which Rosamond Vincy sets Dorothea straight about Will Ladislaw that one wonders if Gissing had it in mind. The effect on Rhoda, however, is not to throw her back into the arms of her suitor but for her to come into her inspired feminist self. “Herself strongly moved, Rhoda had never spoken so impressively, had never given counsel of such earnest significance.” She offers encouragement to Monica. “My dear girl, you may live to be one of the most contented and most useful women in England” (echoes of Daniel Deronda exhorting Gwendolyn Harleth?). But Rhoda has a different idea in mind from Deronda’s vague vision that Gwendolyn may live to “make others glad they were born” while he himself leaves England to work for Zionism. Rhoda is exhorting Monica to engage with her in