A studious child, his love of fiction was sparked when he first read Charles Dickens, who would prove to be a lifelong inspiration for Gissing. George Gissing (1857-1903) was a British author from Wakefield, Yorkshire. A riveting story, and highly provocative for the time in which it was published, ‘The Odd Women’ is a sympathetic novel which was ahead of its time.

Her close friend Rhoda Nunn is strongly of the opinion that marriage is a disastrous choice for women, but their young protégé Monica Madden goes against them both when she decides to marry a seemingly kind older man. Mary Barfoot is one of these surplus women - a feminist philanthropist, she is training women to have careers of their own. The ‘odd’ of the title refers to the fact that in Victorian Britain there were more men than women, and many women therefore found themselves surplus.

Notice will be given by 20 March and the panel will be submitted for consideration on 1 April in accordance to the CFP (see ).First published in 1893, ‘The Odd Women’ by Victorian author George Gissing revolves around the themes of feminism, marriage, and love through the lives of several contrasting women. Please submit your queries and abstract of up to 250 words and a brief biography of no more than 50 words to Dr Tom Ue (Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Toronto Scarborough, and Honorary Research Associate, University College London) at by 15 March. Papers may explore any work of Gissing’s but they must speak to the conference’s focus: “Conflict and Resolution.” In celebration, and to mark both the protest movements of 1968 and the women’s suffrage of 1918, we invite contributions for proposed panels on Gissing and his writing in the Annual Literary London Society Conference, held on 28-29 June 2018, at the Institute of English Studies in the University of London. 2018 celebrates the 125 th anniversary of The Odd Women (1893), a novel that treats so many issues central to the nineteenth century, including marriage, professionalism, inheritance, and class.

Recent scholarship, particularly George Gissing and the Woman Question: Convention and Dissent (2013), edited by Christine Huguet and Simon James, has opened up new ways of thinking about Gissing’s depiction of women.

The odd women by george gissing