The Odd Women

I want to do away with that common confusion of the words womanly and womanish, and I see very clearly that this can only be effected by an armed movement, an invasion by women of the spheres which men have always forbidden us to enter. What a great book, and extremely progressive, even radical,......more

Possibly my favourite Gissing so far. A brilliant, engaging novel with fascinating and feminist themes, one of the most interesting Victorian books I've read.......more

Love this book!!I have read it with an exasperating slowness, but I was able to enjoy it as I haven't been to do for a long time with the books of these last months. They are those women who, by fate or economic condition, are unable to reach marriage, thus remaining forced to enter the working worl......more

Starring Rhoda Nunn, Victorian radfem. Rhoda on the difficulty of young women getting decent jobs: I know it perfectly well. And I wish it were harder. I wish girls fell down and died of hunger in the streets, instead of creeping to their garrets and hospitals. I should like to see their dead bodies c......more

What do you do, if the only socially acceptable career is marriage - and no one marries you? In late nineteenth century England, millions of women were condemned to live a life of shabby-genteel desperation because there simply weren't enough men to have for husbands and virtually no actual employme......more