The Odd Women (Norton Library) - Couverture souple

Gissing, George

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0393006107 ISBN 13 : 9780393006100

Editeur : W. W. Norton & Company, 1971

Synopsis

"[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, The English Novel Five odd women-women without husbands-are 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. Alice and Virginia Madden, suddenly left adrift by the death of their improvident father, must take grinding and humiliating "genteel" work. Terrified of sharing their fate, their younger sister Monica accepts a proposal of marriage from a man who gives her financial security but makes her life wretched. Interwoven with their fortunes are Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn, who are dedicating their lives to training young women in skills they can use to support themselves. Their broader aim is to help free both sexes from whatever distorts or depletes their humanity? including, if necessary, marriage. Into their lives comes Mary's forceful and engaging cousin, Everard Barfoot, and as he and Rhoda become locked in an increasingly significant and passionate struggle, Rhoda finds out through the refining fire what "love" sometimes means and what it means to be true to herself.

A propos du livre

Biographie de l'auteur

George Robert Gissing (1857–1903) was an English novelist who published twenty-three novels between 1880 and 1903. From his early naturalistic works, he developed into one of the most accomplished realists of the late-Victorian era. Gissing is given prominent space in Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind. Gissing's conservatism was rooted in his aristocratic sensibility. After a brief flirtation with socialism in his youth, Gissing quickly lost faith in the labour movements and scorned the popular enthusiasms of his day. In 1892, he wrote to his sister Ellen, "I fear we shall live through great troubles yet...We cannot resist it, but I throw what weight I may have on the side of those who believe in an aristocracy of brains, as against the brute domination of the quarter-educated mob." In The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, Gissing reflected: "To think I once called myself a socialist, communist, anything you like of the revolutionary kind! Not for long, to be sure, and I suspect there was always something in me that scoffed when my lips uttered such things."

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: W. W. Norton & Company
• Date d'édition: 1971
• ISBN 10: 0393006107
• ISBN 13: 9780393006100
• Reliure: Broché
• Langue: anglais
• Nombre de pages: 348
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible