The Odd Women [Paperback]

Five odd womenwomen without husbandsare the subject of this powerful novel, set in Victorian London, by a writer whose perceptions about people, particularly women, would be remarkable in any age and are extraordinary in the 1890s. The story concerns the choices that five different women have to make and what those choices imply about men's and women's status in society and relationship to each other. [Gissing] achieved one of the very few novels in English that can be compared with those of the French naturalists who were his contemporaries. Walter Allen,