Abstract
In a letter written to his German friend, Eduard Bertz, in February 1892, Gissing outlined his plans for a new novel:
The book I now have in mind is to deal with the great question of ‘throwing pearls before swine’. It will present those people who, congenitally incapable of true education, have yet been taught to consider themselves too good for manual, or any humble, work. As yet I have chiefly dealt with types expressing the struggles of nature endowed above their station; now I turn to those who are below it. The story will be a study of vulgarism — the all but triumphant force of our time. Women will be the chief characters.1
It is the problem of today, the establishment of a new relation, or the readjustment of the old one, between man and woman.
D. H. Lawrence
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Notes
Lloyd Fernando, ‘New Women’ in the Late Victorian Novel (1977).
John Goode, ‘The Art of Fiction: Walter Besant and Henry James’, Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1966) 243–81.
See Harriet Martineau, ‘Female Industry’, Edinburgh Review, CCXXII (April 1859).
See W. R. Greg, ‘Why are Women Redundant?’, National Review, XIV (April 1862) 434–60.
Alison Cotes, ‘New Women and Odd Women’, Gissing Newsletter, XIV (April 1978) 1 – 20.
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© 1989 John Sloan
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Sloan, J. (1989). Oddness and Typicality: The Odd Women. In: George Gissing: The Cultural Challenge. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19943-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19943-3_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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