The Odd Women

Author: George Gissing
Publisher: e-artnow
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
The Odd Women is a Victorian novel which deals with themes such as the role of women in society, marriage, morals and the early feminist movement. There was the notion in Victorian England that there was an excess of one million women over men. This meant there were "odd" women left over at the end of the equation when the other men and women had paired off in marriage. A cross-section of women dealing with this problem are described in "The Odd Women" and it can be inferred that their lifestyles also set them apart as odd in the sense of strange.

The Odd Women

Author: George Gissing
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1770488286
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
George Gissing’s The Odd Women dramatizes key issues relating to class and gender in late-Victorian culture: the changing relationship between the sexes, the social impact of ‘odd’ or ‘redundant’ women, the cultural impact of ‘the new woman,’ and the opportunities for and conditions of employment in the expanding service sector of the economy. At the heart of these issues as many late Victorians saw them was a problem of the imbalance in the ratio of men to women in the population. There were more females than males, which meant that more and more women would be left unmarried; they would be ‘odd’ or ‘redundant,’ and would be forced to be independent and to find work to support themselves. In the Broadview edition, Gissing’s text is carefully annotated and accompanied by a range of documents from the period that help to lay out the context in which the book was written. In Gissing’s story, Virginia Madden and her two sisters are confronted upon the death of their father with sudden impoverishment. Without training for employment, and desperate to maintain middle-class respectability, they face a daunting struggle. In Rhoda Nunn, a strong feminist, Gissing also presents a strong character who draws attention overtly to the issues behind the novel. The Odd Women is one of the most important social novels of the late nineteenth century.

The Odd Woman and the City

Author: Vivian Gornick
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374711682
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 125

Book Description
A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees. Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, The Odd Woman and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis.

Odd Woman Out

Author: Melanie Chartoff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781735268927
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description

Odd Girl Out

Author: Laura James
Publisher: Seal Press
ISBN: 1580057799
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
A sensory portrait of an autistic mind From childhood, Laura James knew she was different. She struggled to cope in a world that often made no sense to her, as though her brain had its own operating system. It wasn't until she reached her forties that she found out why: Suddenly and surprisingly, she was diagnosed with autism. With a touching and searing honesty, Laura challenges everything we think we know about what it means to be autistic. Married with four children and a successful journalist, Laura examines the ways in which autism has shaped her career, her approach to motherhood, and her closest relationships. Laura's upbeat, witty writing offers new insight into the day-to-day struggles of living with autism, as her extreme attention to sensory detail -- a common aspect of her autism -- is fascinating to observe through her eyes. As Laura grapples with defining her own identity, she also looks at the unique benefits neurodiversity can bring. Lyrical and lush, Odd Girl Out shows how being different doesn't mean being less, and proves that it is never too late for any of us to find our rightful place in the world.

The Odd Woman

Author: Gail Godwin
Publisher: Virago Press
ISBN: 9781860498589
Category : Man-woman relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
Jane Clifford is in her early thirties, smart, attractive, and seemingly kitted out for life with a Ph.D., a job as a popular teacher at a midwestern college, and an affair with a married man. But Jane knows better. And she wants more. She knows what she wants -- passion, romance, 'an age of bustles and rustling silk, fine manners and literary soirees' -- AND what she doesn't want -- to hand her life over to a man. And after a lifetime of looking to books for the answers to life's conundrums, she seems to be finding only more questions . . .

George Gissing, the Working Woman, and Urban Culture

Author: Emma Liggins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351933981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
George Gissing's work reflects his observations of fin-de-siècle London life. Influenced by the French naturalist school, his realist representations of urban culture testify to the significance of the city for the development of new class and gender identities, particularly for women. Liggins's study, which considers standard texts such as The Odd Women, New Grub Street, and The Nether World as well as lesser known short works, examines Gissing's fiction in relation to the formation of these new identities, focusing specifically on debates about the working woman. From the 1880s onward, a new genre of urban fiction increasingly focused on work as a key aspect of the modern woman's identity, elements of which were developed in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s. Showing his fascination with the working woman and her narrative potential, Gissing portrays women from a wide variety of occupations, ranging from factory girls, actresses, prostitutes, and shop girls to writers, teachers, clerks, and musicians. Liggins argues that by placing the working woman at the center of his narratives, rather than at the margins, Gissing made an important contribution to the development of urban fiction, which increasingly reflected current debates about women's presence in the city.

Odd Girl Out

Author: Ann Bannon
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
ISBN: 0857999656
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
The classic 1950s love story from the Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction, and author of Odd Girl Out, I Am a Woman, Women in the Shadows, Journey to a Woman and Beebo Brinker She was the brain, the sparkle, the gay rebel of the sorority, and wonders of wonders, she chose Laura as her roommate. That was how it began... Suddenly they were alone on an island of forbidden bliss Taking a pseudonym in the interest of privacy, Bannon wrote her first book, Odd Girl Out, as a coming-of-age novel that involved love between college sorority sisters. When an editor singled-out the school-girl romance as her story's most compelling feature, the book was re-written for a lesbian pulp fiction audience. Unlike most pulps, however, Bannon broke with tradition by avoiding sensationalistic plots in favour of emotionally engaged character development. Odd Girl Out enjoyed tremendous success, inspiring other ground-breaking works, most notably Beebo Brinker. “Odd Girl Out begins the saga of Laura, off on her own at college, appallingly shy and terminally polite...Laura meets Beth, whose brash straightforwardness and friendly attitude take the younger woman by storm, leading into an equally stormy affair” Metro Times

The Hearing Trumpet

Author: Leonora Carrington
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374641
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel. Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

Author: Lillian Faderman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231530749
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Book Description
As Lillian Faderman writes, there are "no constants with regard to lesbianism," except that lesbians prefer women. In this groundbreaking book, she reclaims the history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to more recent diverse lifestyles. She draws from journals, unpublished manuscripts, songs, media accounts, novels, medical literature, pop culture artifacts, and oral histories by lesbians of all ages and backgrounds, uncovering a narrative of uncommon depth and originality.