Gissing's The Odd Women: review

THE ODD WOMEN. Edited by Arlene Young. Broadview Literary Editions, 1998.

Broadview is a Canadian publisher: an enterprising newcomer whose list of edited and annotated classic novels is rapidly expanding. The press’s intention must be to give the venerable, long-established Norton Critical Editions a run for their money, by supplying not only an introduction and textual notes pitched at the undergraduate level, but also a selection of secondary materials, historical, contemporary reviews and critical commentary; the whole thing well bound, with attractive typography and all at a competitive price.

Their enterprise is especially welcome in the case of The Odd Women, Gissing’s second most commonly studied novel. Curiously, given its value to social historians as well as to literature, there has never been a properly edited edition of this masterpiece, which Dr Young leads off provocatively in her introduction by defining as "arguably the most important novel published in Britain in the 1890s". (She goes on to sharpen and restrict her definition of ‘important’.) The Virago edition (1980) has only an introduction by Margaret Walters. It has the same pagination as the Blond ed of 1968, but the frequent textual errors there are corrected. The New American Library edition has a lengthy introduction by Elaine Showalter which is perceptive and informed but unfortunately has a few factual errors. The current Penguin edition, based on this one, does not correct the errors; nor does it bring the bibliography up to date.

Young’s base text is the first edition, the only one to appear in Gissing’s lifetime, to which she says she has made "occasional minor alterations to correct obvious typographical errors or to eliminate awkwardly archaic spellings." The text seems generally accurate, but some misprints have unfortunately been introduced: I noticed "labouriously", p.53, "No doubt she was weighed advantages", p.138; "to take you word", p.281; "Whenever he sister", p.301, none of which are present in the first edition.

It is always a difficult and sensitive matter to know what needs annotating, especially when the texts is specifically designed for teaching undergraduates who live outside Britain – the notes have to address the needs of students who have a hazy knowledge of English life as it is now, let alone the English life of a century ago. Thus Dr Young is surely right to gloss the exact meaning of ‘tea’ in the middle-class context here. On the other hand, one might question whether a reader who is ever likely to pick up this novel, or even to be given it as a set text, needs to be told that hock is a German white wine or that a hansom was a cab; that a sovereign was a coin or that the Strand is a London street. Dr Young also adopts the unusual strategy of repeating her notes, presumably in case the reader has forgotten her earlier definition: the notes to ‘tea’ and to ‘bait’ are both reprinted identically at different points in the text.

Two casual allusions in The Odd Women have always intrigued me, and I was disappointed to see that Dr Young lets me down for both. One is the mathematician Micklethwaite’s casual reference to ‘the relativity of time and space’ as being a concept that his new wife might hope to master> Is it really as striking as it seems that Gissing could put that phrase in his mouth in 1893, twelve years before Einstein’s paper on special relativity? A note would have helped here. Second, I’ve never understood Mary Barfoot’s comment to Rhoda, apropos Everard’s plan to cane his sister-in-law, that "we know the story of the lady and the glove." We probably don’t, in fact; and Young does not enlighten us. The reference is either to a poem by Leigh Hunt or one by Browning – both equally obscure, at least to this reviewer. (I’m grateful to Margot Louis and others in the VICTORIA Internet forum for identifying these recently.)

It’s a pity that Young’s notes are so closely restricted to factual matters. I know from experience that Gissing’s irony can bewilder young students, and it’s unfortunate, at a couple of key points, that the notes don’t spell out Gissing’s precise implication. One might be to clarify the new occupation of Miss Eade, Monica’s old rival at the shop, who Monica runs into at Victoria station. She is described as waiting for her ‘brother’s’ train, and also in ‘casual colloquy’ with ‘men who also stood waiting – perchance for their sisters’: at this point a nudge to the naive reader might be useful. Another is the ironical observation by the narrator that Monica’s shop, Messrs Scotcher, ‘had no objection whatever to their young friends taking a stroll after closing-time each evening…. The air of Walworth Road is pure and invigorating about midnight’. The implication that they implicitly permit this to allow their employees to supplement their meagre wages by prostitution is lost on most students – who naturally don’t know where the shop is located (Gissing doesn’t say at this point): it could be in the airy outer suburbs for all they know at this point.

The secondary material is well-chosen. There are six contemporary reviews, seven extracts on women and marriage (Tennyson, Patmore, Ruskin, Mill etc) – the obvious sources, but none the worse for that, and ingeniously abridged, particularly in the case of the notoriously rambling Ruskin’s "Of Queens’ Gardens". There are six extracts on the New Woman issue and two further sets of extracts on clerking employment, and shop assistants’ working conditions: the choice of the vivid extracts from that ex-draper’s assistant H.G. Wells being especially revealing.

There is little in any of the apparatus to this edition to reveal its Canadian origins. English speakers in other countries, certainly in Britain or Australia, might be slightly confused by the editor’s perhaps unintentional conflation, in the extracts and notes to them, of the terms ‘clerk’ (or ‘salesclerk’) and ‘shop assistant’. Outside North America a ‘clerk’ is always and only an office worker (usually of humble status), and never one who stands behind a counter.