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Mary Barfoot had never suffered from lack of interest in life. Many a vivid moment dwelt in her memory; joys and sorrows, personal or of larger scope, affected her the more deeply because of that ruling intelligence which enabled her to transmute them into...

Not till mid-winter did Barfoot again see his friends the Micklethwaites. By invitation he went to South Tottenham on New Year’s Eve, and dined with them at seven o’clock. He was the first guest that had entered the house since their marriage. From the very...

Alighting, on his return to London, at the Savoy Hotel, Barfoot insensibly prolonged his stay there. For the present he had no need of a more private dwelling; he could not see more than a few days ahead; his next decisive step was as...

‘My own dearest love, if I could but describe to you all I have suffered before sitting down to write this letter! Since our last meeting I have not known one hour of quietness. To think that I missed you when you called...

Mrs Cosgrove was a childless widow, with sufficient means and a very mixed multitude of acquaintances. In the general belief her marriage had been a happy one; when she spoke of her deceased husband, it was with respect, and not seldom with affection. Yet...

Seated in the reading-room of a club to which he had newly procured admission, Everard Barfoot was glancing over the advertisement columns of a literary paper. His eye fell on an announcement that had a personal interest for him, and at once he went...

Just before Christmas of 1887, a lady past her twenties and with a look of discouraged weariness on her thin face, knocked at a house-door in a little street by Lavender Hill. A card in the window gave notice that a bed-room was here...

Virginia’S reply to Miss Nunn’s letter brought another note next morning—Saturday. It was to request a call from the sisters that same afternoon. Alice, unfortunately, would not be able to leave home. Her disorder had become a feverish cold, caught, doubtless, between open window and...

Rhoda’s week at the seashore was spoilt by uncertain weather. Only two days of abiding sunshine; for the rest, mere fitful gleams across a sky heaped with stormclouds. Over Wastdale hung a black canopy; from Scawfell came mutterings of thunder; and on the last...

Monica and her husband, on leaving the house in Queen’s Road, walked slowly in the eastward direction. Though night had fallen, the air was not unpleasant; they had no object before them, and for five minutes they occupied themselves with their thoughts. Then Widdowson...

When Widdowson went up to the bed-room that night, Monica was already asleep. He discovered this on turning up the gas; the light fell upon her face, and he was drawn to the bedside to look at her. The features signified nothing but repose;...

When Barfoot made his next evening call, Rhoda did not appear. He sat for some time in pleasant talk with his cousin, no reference whatever being made to Miss Nunn; then at length, beginning to fear that he would not see her, he inquired...

A Week’s notice to her employers would release Monica from the engagement in Walworth Road; such notice must be given on Monday, so that, if she could at once make up her mind to accept Miss Barfoot’s offer, the coming week would be...

`There are half a million more women than men in this unhappy country of ours . . . So many odd women - no making a pair with them.' The idea of the superfluity of unmarried women was one the `New Woman' novels of the 1890s sought to challenge. But in The Odd Women (1893) Gissing satirizes the prevailing literary image of the `New Woman' and makes the point that unmarried women were generally viewed less as noble and romantic figures than as `odd' and marginal in relation to the ideal of womanhood itself. Set in grimy, fog-ridden London, these `odd' women range from the idealistic, financially self-sufficient Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn, who run a school to train young women in office skills for work, to the Madden sisters struggling to subsist in low-paid jobs and experiencing little comfort or pleasure in their lives. Yet it is for the youngest Madden sister's marriage that the novel reserves its most sinister critique. With superb detachment Gissing captures contemporary society's ambivalence towards its own period of transition. The Odd Women is a novel engaged with all the major sexual and social issues of the late-nineteenth century. Judged by contemporary reviewers as equal to Zola and Ibsen, Gissing was seen to have produced an `intensely modern' work and it is perhaps for this reason that the issues it raises remain the subject of contemporary debate.

At that corner of Battersea Park which is near Albert Bridge there has lain for more than twenty years a curious collection of architectural fragments, chiefly dismembered columns, spread in order upon the ground, and looking like portions of a razed temple. It is...

A DISAPPOINTMENT awaited him. Miss Barfoot was not well enough to see any one. Had she been suffering long?—he inquired. No; it was only this evening; she had not dined, and was gone to her room. Miss Nunn could not receive him. He went home,...

When they reached the house at Herne Hill, the sisters were both in a state of nervous tremor. Monica had only the vaguest idea of the kind of person Mrs Luke Widdowson would prove to be, and Virginia seemed to herself to be walking...

And neither was content. Barfoot, over his cigar and glass of whisky at the hotel, fell into a mood of chagrin. The woman he loved would be his, and there was matter enough for ardent imagination in the indulgence of that thought; but his temper...

In consequence of letters exchanged during the week, next Sunday brought the three Miss Maddens to Queen’s Road, to lunch with Miss Barfoot. Alice had recovered from her cold, but was still ailing, and took rather a gloomy view of the situation she had...

From Herne Hill to St Peter Port was a change which made of Monica a new creature. The weather could not have been more propitious; day after day of still air and magnificent sky, with temperature which made a brisk walk at any hour...

‘So to-morrow, Alice,’ said Dr Madden, as he walked with his eldest daughter on the coast-downs by Clevedon, ‘I shall take steps for insuring my life for a thousand pounds.’* It was the outcome of a long and intimate conversation. Alice Madden, aged...

This diary is an important source for Gissing's work. It records his literary activities, the ups and downs of his personal and domestic life, his journeys, his responses to changes in society, and his relationships with others in the literary world.

in the trenches of Sebastopol, when a young officer who was just the age of Wilfred Owen abandoned Stendhal's view of the hero in war and decided that, "By virtue of my oath and still more because of my feeling for humanity, I cannot be silent." His advocacy of non-resistance came later, but Isaiah Berlin's conclusion that Tolstoy's "sense of reality was . . . too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to construct out of the fragments into which his intellect shivered the world," reads rather strangely only a decade after it was written.