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When their father's death leaves them with no money and a dim future, the Madden sisters, Alice, Virginia, and Monica, must negotiate the gender roles and class constraints of Victorian London in the 1890s. Virginia and Alice have aged out of the possibility of marriage and seemingly the idea of love itself and find themselves with few prospects and little hope. Remaindered in the marriage equation, these “odd women” face a great deal of scrutiny, stigma, and social pressure—it's at this time that Rhoda Nunn, childhood friend to the Madden sisters, arrives in London to challenge accepted norms and mores around the role of women in society. Rhoda's strong feminist passion draws a sharp contrast to the middle-class respectability of the Madden sisters'upbring, as the sisters watch a new world emerge around them. Hailed as a prescient and boldly political novel of the early feminist movement, Gissing's The Odd Women captures all of the absurdity, brutality, and even comedy of Victorian attitudes around gender and class, and the brilliant women who dared to be odd and to conceive of their role in society beyond their value on the marriage market.

The storyline of the novel The Emancipated, written by George Gissing, is set in Italy. It depicts a group of British middle class intellectuals going on a tour through the countryside and doing things they might later either bless or regret. This book shows their adventures and search of identity.

The Odd Women is a Victorian novel which deals with themes such as the role of women in society, marriage, morals and the early feminist movement. There was the notion in Victorian England that there was an excess of one million women over men. This meant there were'odd'women left over at the end of the equation when the other men and women had paired off in marriage. A cross-section of women dealing with this problem are described in'The Odd Women'and it can be inferred that their lifestyles also set them apart as odd in the sense of strange.

Charles Dickens: A Critical Study was written in Siena, Italy in 1897 and first published by Blackie in the Victorian Era Series in February 1898. Any doubts that readers and critics harboured over the choice of Gissing as author were swept aside on the book's publication. It was hailed as a triumphant feat of original and incisive criticism allied to level-headed conclusions. Literature, the forerunner of the Times Literary Supplement, described the book as'the best study of Dickens we have ever read.'The book became an instant classic with many reprints over the succeeding decades.-Print ed.George Robert Gissing was born on November 22, 1857, and died on December 28, 1903. He was an English novelist who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. Recent years have seen a strong revival of interest in Gissing, many of whose novels are now available in reprints. A bridge between late Victorianism and early modernism, Gissing's novels combine two essential themes of the period; the isolation and struggle of the artist and the economic bondage of the proletariat. New Grub Street (1891) and his own indirect autobiography, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), reveal the close connection in Gissing between fiction and autobiography. Workers in the Dawn (1880) and Demos: A Story of English Socialism (1892) dramatizes Gissing's conviction that economic and class divisions are central to human character and individual destiny. Gissing died from emphysema at age 46 after catching a chill on an ill-advised winter walk. Verinilda was published incomplete in 1904. He is buried in the English cemetery at Saint-Jean-de-Luz.

'En este feliz país nuestro hay medio millón más de mujeres que de hombres.... Tantas mujeres solteras para las que no existe posibilidad de pareja. Los pesimistas las llaman vidas inútiles, perdidas y vanas. Ni que decir tiene que yo, como parte integrante de ese grupo, no pienso así'Son las palabras de una de las protagonistas y heroína de esta insólita novela de Gissing escrita a finales del siglo XIX. Insólita porque sus dos personajes femeninos centrales, Rhoda y Monica, son mujeres que ansían la independencia, económica, social e intelectual. Son mujeres que, de hecho, piensan.Ambientada en el escenario gris, mugriento y con la niebla de fondo de Londres, el autor nos lanza con un estilo de desapego narrativo un alegato feminista que se entrelaza con la trama romántica a través de la que seguimos las historias de amor de estas dos mujeres: Rhoda que se siente halagada por el cortejo de un hombre liberal y moderno; Monica que se casa con un hombre al que no ama, llegando a considerar la posibilidad de fugarse con un amante para librarse de un matrimonio que no le satisface.La primera representa la independencia financiera y el poder adquisitivo, mientras que la segunda, como toda su familia, apenas logra subsistir con un trabajo mal pagado. Juzgada por sus contemporáneos como una obra tan provocativa como lo fueron los trabajos de Zola o Ibsen, Gissing logra una novela increíblemente moderna que toca temas que continúan aún hoy en día siendo vigentes y relevantes en nuestra sociedad.