Backlisted - The Odd Women By George Gissing

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

George Gissing's The Odd Women (1893) is the groundbreaking book featured in this episode of Backlisted. Joining John and Andy to discuss this fascinating, proto-feminist novel - and the incident-packed life of its prolific author - are novelist and biographer Janet Todd and the professor of Victorian literature at the University of Durham, Simon James. Also in this episode Andy has been reading The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping by Samantha Harvey; and John enjoys A Musical Offering, a suite of stories about music by the Argentine writer Luis Sagasti.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)8'31 - The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey15'48 A musical Offering by Luis Sagasti21'48 - The Odd Women By George Gissing* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Jan, you're calling from Cambridge. I already know this. I am. I'm sitting at my husband's desk, which is extraordinarily uncomfortable, and I'm surrounded by all sorts of machinery that I don't usually use, including all this webcam and whatnot.

I have a much more respectable, bookie sort of office and I much prefer it. I love the idea of a manly desk, very gissing kind of. Yes, it is actually. The whole thing is, I think men on the whole seem to like sort of big backed black chairs. I have noticed this. It's not just in my own home. Simon, so we've got somebody from Cambridge

and we've got somebody from Cambridge and we've got somebody from elsewhere in the country. Where are you? I'm a couple of miles south of Durham, so just on the banks of the Weir. If you have to be locked down somewhere, I can recommend being locked down in the Durham countryside. Brilliant. Are you affected by the North East being put into lockdown? I suppose you probably are. It will be, but we're not going out. We're not going to the pub and we're not seeing anyone. So in that sense, for bookish people,

the lockdown is probably a bit less of a disaster than it otherwise might be. Go on, Mitch. OK, shall we start? Kick it off. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us walking briskly through the dusty streets of late Victorian London.

We've left a cramped set of rooms in Lavender Hill and are making our way towards Miss Barfoot's workroom in Great Portland Street, pondering the implications of trying to make do in London on Sixpence a Day. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Joining us today are Janet Todd and Simon James. Hello, both of you. Hello. Hi. Hello. Janet Todd is known especially for her biographies and editions of early women writers. She's published books on Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Samuel Richardson and Aphra Behn. Her most recent novel, published by the Fenton Press earlier this year, is Don't You Know There's a War On?

In 2018, Fenton also published her memoir, Radiation Diaries, described by someone called Hilary Mantel, I've never heard of her, as frank, wry and unexpectedly heartening. That's a lovely thing to say about somebody's book. Jan, were you delighted? I think it is. I'm hugely grateful that she said it too, so that I can mention it in the book.

It was a rather odd thing to do, really. In the end, the overarching thing was a cancer diary, but it turned out to be a memoir of my life, interspersed with the bits of cancer. And I rather wish I'd done two books. I'd written a memoir, perhaps, separately from it. But in the process of that, I did discuss various ailments that I have been heir to in my long life. And one is certainly insomnia, which I think you're going to discuss. And I feel very strongly that my insomnia is greater than anybody else's. I feel hugely competitive. I love these insomnia books, but I do feel a sense of great competition about it. Our second guest is Simon James. Simon is

Professor of Victorian Literature at the Department of English Studies, Durham University. He's published and edited work on HG Wells, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Victorian bestsellers Trilby and The Sorrows of Satan. He regularly contributes to the Durham Book Festival, was the principal investigator on the Durham Commission on Creativity and Education for Arts Council England. Simon's PhD was mostly on, brackets, and he's published two books on, close brackets, George Gissing.

Hello, Simon. Hi, it's a real pleasure to be on the BAT Books podcast. Thank you for having me. I must tell the listeners how this invitation came about. Yes, you must. So Simon and I have been talking about him possibly coming on to Batlisted for some time. And I've still got you penciled in for a couple of books, but I'm not going to say what they are because we don't want to we don't want to let the cat out the back but the other day Simon was saying on Twitter how much he'd enjoyed our episode on Therese

Rakan by Emile Zola the most recent episode and backlisted replied to him and said well Simon if you if you enjoyed that you're certainly certainly going to enjoy the ongoing naturalistic theme, because next time we're doing George Gissing. And Simon replied, oh, yes, as you can imagine, I'm looking forward to that more than almost any episode ever. And I was sitting here reading that tweet and I was thinking to myself, oh, yeah, he probably is looking forward to that because he's written a couple of books on George Gissing. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

I could ask him to come on. So we are tremendously grateful to you for sharing your expertise with us at relatively short notice. It's great to be here. And a delight, actually, to read The Odd Women again for, you know, not since I finished the book. So I know you've talked in an early episode about reading different writers, reading J.D. Salinger in youth and middle age. So it's been really interesting rereading The Odd Women at my current time of life. Well, that is the book we're doing.

So The Odd Women, George Gissing. The Odd Women's quite a long book. And we set this date up 48 hours ago. Have you really reread The Odd Woman in 48 hours? Yes, I did. I'm lucky I can read quite quickly. My PhD was on Gissing and Charles Dickens and HG Wells. And also, I spent a year working on Henry James, who never made it into the final version of the thesis. So if there's any young people out there listening and thinking about doing a PhD thesis, may I advise, don't choose four of the most prolific novelists of the 19th century

for what is supposed to be a three-year project. But fortunately, I think if you work on Victorian fiction, you have to be someone who can read or at least reread quite quickly. So yes, I have, just as Anthony Trollope would write novels with his stopwatch at his elbow, timing himself, I've been reading this novel with my watch at my elbow to make sure it was fully done by the time we convened again this evening. Janet, in your own fiction, did you respond in some way against the longer novels? I mean, obviously your interest is probably earlier, the long 18th century rather than the 19th century.

But, you know, let's be honest, Richardson, not a slouch when it comes to length. It's true. It's very true. Well, I actually am a very, very slow reader. So, in fact, I spent about a year reading Samuel Richardson. But I am one of the few people who has read Sir Charles Granderson, which is the really huge one. Me too. I have also read the interminable French romances of the 17th century,

so I feel I've done my bit. But my trouble was that I came to kissing very early, and then came feminism, and I did women writers, you know. I excavated, and I wrote about them and I taught them. And I was up to my gills in early women writers. And so it was a long time before the dead white male really came into focus again. And reading, getting again now, I realised that the gap between the first reading and this, my second reading, is, well, much over half a century. Well, we should definitely come back to that. But before we do that, Andy, I should ask you what you've been reading this week. Thank you, John.

I've been reading a book called The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey. This was published in January this year, and it's taken on a sort of unhappy relevance and resonance as the year has gone on. The subtitle is a year of not sleeping and as we alluded to earlier on this is a book about insomnia speaking for myself i haven't slept so little since my son was a baby quite some time ago i reckon i get about four or five

hours a night tops and consider that if comes in one burst, consider that quite fortunate. Oh, God, yes. So Samantha Harvey's book is a very interesting combination of, it's a collection of essays, elements of memoir. There's a short story that is created seemingly in the course of the book, that is created seemingly in the course of the book, which she visits first as an idea and then starts to work through for you, the reader. And that's quite challenging, I think, to bookshops.

Where on earth is this book going to live? But it's not challenging to the reader once they are into the flow of the book, because what it's actually like, ingeniously, is a night of sleeplessness. It wanders from topic to topic, sometimes rather blissfully, sometimes rather anxiously. sometimes rather anxiously. It revisits embarrassing moments, moments of pride. It dwells on the paranoia about what will happen if you don't get any sleep. It's very, very well written, as you would expect from a novelist of Samantha Harvey's stature. She's the author of Dear Thief, The Western Wind, a couple of other things. I'll just read you a little bit.

There aren't any chapters, but this is a section called 3am. The long trail of the freight train snags the night. Something has been torn. How apt that phrase morning has broken. It won't be mended now until night falls again. From here there will be no more freight trains, then the first flight passing overhead at around four and at five or five thirty the traffic will start up and from there our hyperactive little planet will flare once more to life. At three the first ember has already taken. In reality, for those awake enough to register it, there is about an hour of night at most,

somewhere between two and three, a brief lull between one day dwindling and the next awakening. I get up. Current wisdom is conflicted on this. Some sleep regimes say you should get up if you're still awake after 20 minutes so that you don't associate bed with sleeplessness. Others say you should stay in bed regardless so that you don't signal to the body that it's normal to be up in the night. Instead you stay in bed and accept what comes. Inherently inert at night and clinging onto some idea of myself as a good sleeper I'm much more predisposed to the latter tonight though I get up I'm restless I make a cup of tea

absolutely no sleep regimes advocate having a caffeinated drink at 3am but I did it once and went straight to sleep afterwards so occasionally I try it just in case it works again, which it never has. There's a line from a Philip Larkin poem that comes to me. I don't know the poem firsthand. I found it in a book about poetry I've recently read, something about a million petaled flower. Sitting on the sofa in my underwear drinking tea, I do the other thing no sleep regime advocates. I go online. There is the poem in which Larkin remarks on the oblivion of death. It is only oblivion, he says. We had it before, but then it was going to end, and was all the time merging with a unique endeavour to bring to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here. It feels like a bell ringing distantly, like the heralding of company in what you thought was a desert or an abyss.

Suddenly I don't feel lonely, I feel elated, and everything is soft and full of echoes and resonance. Then I think of a line from another poem by Jack Underwood that describes the elation of holding a newborn baby. I can feel my socks being on, he writes, and when I read it I can feel my socks being on even if I'm not wearing any. At around half past three I go back to bed. To have come this far through the night and feel in some way peaceful is surely an augur for sleep. Also, I'm cold. Getting into bed, nestling down, there are a few minutes of contentment that remind me of how it always used to be. I used to love going to bed. Remember that now. My life, so convoluted and iterative and searching, is nothing more complex or more simple

than the million-petalled flower of being here. I am alive, I think, as if I've just discovered an extraordinary fact. I can feel my life being on. That's lovely. that's lovely wonder so that is a an excerpt from uh the sleepless unease by samantha harvey the poem to which she is referring is uh the old fools from larkin's final collection high windows i believe jan would like to now pass judgment on that rendition of Insomnia. What do you think, Jan? Well, once I knew it was going to come on the programme, I hastily got it.

And with my slow reading, I have not, of course, come to the end. But I recognise it. I recognise everything she says. And I think it is beautifully written. But, of course, in my case, I think I'd been there, done it, tried all that, had the sleeplessness, thought of the poems, got out of bed, done all the things they said, and nothing changes. And so I am actually, after all this, coming to view the idea that it possibly isn't psychological and has nothing to do with anything

except some lack in oneself. Because I've been an insomniac from the beginning. And I knew that it was absolutely there because I went to a horrible boarding school. And we were all in a dormitory and the other girls were breathing. And I found that intolerable. And there was no way I was going to sleep while other people were breathing. intolerable and there was no way I was going to sleep while other people were breathing. So I started telling them stories to try to keep them awake. And so I have a sense of storytelling, poetry and insomnia all jumbled up in my mind. And I find that this is one book that does some of that too. Anyway, I'll stop there. I could go on forever about insomnia and I won't. Anyway, I'll stop there.

I could go on forever about insomnia and I won't. John, what have you been reading this week? I have been reading a musical offering by Luis Sagasti, who is an Argentinian writer. I talked about his previous novel, Fireflies, on the podcast. And this one has been released this year by the excellent Charcot Press with, again, a wonderful translation by Fionn Petch. The book is about music. It's about more than music.

But it starts with the story of Count Kaisersling, who was the Russian ambassador to the court of Saxony, who is an insomniac. And he employs J.S. Bach to write a series of variations, now known as the Goldberg Variations, to cure his insomnia. And he gets a young harpsichordist to play them each night in the next room to the Count. And the brilliant thing that Sagasti does with this, he puts that next to the story of Sheret Serard, the young girl who keeps, in The Thousand and One Nights, keeps the caliph awake rather than puts him to sleep because she knows that as soon as he goes to sleep, she'll be executed. So these sort of two mythologies work through the book. A recurring theme, because the book does end up with the story of the Count and particularly with the account of Glenn Gould, probably gave the most famous, in the period of recorded music,

accounts of the Goldberg Variations. Glenn Gould records them at 21 and becomes an overnight sensation. And then he records them again in the same studio 26 years later. And you'll love this, Andy, that he makes the point that maybe the whole of Glenn Gould's work, in between he's played every single bit of Bach keyboard music, the idea that it's one thing, it's one piece of music, and that all music in a way is connected.

Even the pauses between each of the bits of music are not really silence. It's really complex and beautifully written philosophical meditation on silence. There's an amazing key change. He talks about painters as well, Rothko, Mondrian, the relationship between painting and music, synesthesia. It changes key dramatically in the middle of the book, where we suddenly find ourselves with the young Sagasti as a conscript in the Argentinian army, crying in a room with another group of Argentinian prisoners of war listening to music that he was in the Falklands War. And then he also meditates on the performance during the siege of Leningrad of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony,

on the performance during the siege of Leningrad of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, of the amazing story of Messiaen making instruments and writing and composing quartet for the end of time when he's in a prison camp. It calls itself a novel. If you like the kind of Sebald bricolage of history, meditation, popular culture, put together in short, fragmented, meditative paragraphs.

You read it like sort of you read sort of pre-Socratic philosophers rather than you read it as it were a George Gissing novel. I obviously love that. Fortunately, I do like all those things, John. So you're pushing on an open door there. I'm going to read you this because Andy will love this. He may even know this story, but this gives you a bit of the flavour. Apparently, there is a song that the Rolling Stones only play for themselves when they're doing sound checks or rehearsing. Written by Jagger and Richards, it's never been recorded, and they've taken every possible step to prevent anyone recording it in secret. It's said they only play it in the presence of their

most trusted team members, no one else, once or twice only, like a kind of mystical ritual before embarking on a tour. It's a melody that a few fortunate individuals are able to hum to themselves for a moment until the band quickly imprints another song in its place to ensure that no one can retain it. The lyrics, or the lyrics as they're recollected, don't appear to make much sense. At some point, the band thought about recording it on a new album, but as good artists, they knew that its moment had passed. No one is eager to welcome a person raised from the dead or born after their time. Of course, the rumour has spread and people talk about other groups that have done the same, or they claim the story relates to a different band altogether.

Beautiful melody, very simple harmonies, a devastating riff, even better than satisfaction, they insist. Impossible. They've protected their treasure for 40 years to save themselves from having to play it all the time. Our best song hasn't been recorded yet, Keith Richards has said on more than one occasion, yet everyone wanted to see this as an artist's creative optimism. Jagger says the same thing from time to time and once let slip a koan with a smile. Yeah, every now and again we play it. Sometimes when they're improvising, they'll play just a couple of chords. In videos, Jagger and Richards glance at each other and laugh. It's said that someone made a recording during a soundcheck in 1977 and it circulated in pirate copies, but no one's sure which of the hundred pirate ships it's on.

In reality, just like the secret formula for Coca-Cola, no one should care about knowing what it is. Since it went unheard at the time of its composition, the riff was never enfolded in the chrysalis of wonder that protects it from being merely obvious. Now, it would just sound like any other track by the Rolling Stones. There you go. It's the Rolling Rosetta Stone. That sounds terrific.

Sold, John, sold. That reminds me. I do genuinely think you'd enjoy it, actually. I do genuinely. That is, immediately you told me you were reading this, it reminded me of the loser by thomas burnham which is pretty much my favorite book that i read last year which again is about uh well it's like a one it's like a single paragraph for 200 pages of a man

ranting about glenn gould so if that if that's your cup of tea, it's available. We've talked about books enough. Now for some capitalism. After the ball, done by Mr George J. Gatsby. It's as though I'm in 1893. Okay, so that was After the Ball by George J. Gaskin. And that was actually recorded in 1893, 127 years ago, the year in which The Odd Women by George Gissing was published. And we've got a few pieces of music in this episode, all of which first performed or written in 1893.

And that's actually really fascinating to hear a little bit of a cultural context for a book we're going to be talking about. So can I ask you, Jan, as we tend to ask on Backlisted as our opening question, I mean, you've alluded to this already, in fact, where were you, when were you, when you first read The Odd Women? Well, I was very young. I was 18 or 19. And I just got into Cambridge, which was a mega event in those days for a girl, and certainly from my sort of background. And we were sent a list, us rather badly educated people, we were sent a list on how we could get ourselves up a little bit to speed. And on this list was The Odd Women and New Grub Street.

And so I read them and I was totally taken with it. It was pre-feminism. I think one of the things I have to say right now is that my period of growing up, which is the 40s and 50s, is closer to the world of dissing, although perhaps not in terms of the actual real poverty of it, but it's closer in many ways the assumptions to my world than I am now, that my world is to the present. I'd also like to interject for listeners' benefit and say that

in the 40s and 50s, Gissing was still a relatively obscure writer, that the revival doesn't really begin until the 1960s, does it? So your tutors and you were somewhat ahead of the game. The feminism was what was exciting. I thought, how daring. Well, you have to remember what it was actually like. I think people almost forget. The 60s didn't really start till 1967 or 66. The early 60s were pretty well like that in assumptions. I mean, we certainly thought

that marriage and motherhood is what a girl did, and it was necessary to do it. And even after this hugely prestigious degree, many of us were, it was suggested that we do a shorthand typing course so that we could get a job. Good Lord. So that it isn't so very different. And divorce was a huge stigma. It was possible. It was more possible than it was in Gitting's time. But the person who was the divorcee was stigmatised very much.

And certainly in the earlier part of this period, when I was actually growing up, there were more women around than men. The wars had seen to that. And the spinster was a figure of mockery among the married. So I, you know, that I thought, oh, well, that's ordinary. But it was the feminism that I was very excited about. But then came feminism. And I spent really the next half century or even more excavating women writers, working on women writers and, you know, writing the balance while the chaps went on. You know, we kept on teaching the men, but, you know,

the reading was done and the research was on early women writers. And so I didn't go back to Gissing at all until just now. I would love to double back in a moment and talk about how you felt about reading the book again. This time I read it and I thought, well, there's the feminism. It sounds a bit like Mary Wollstonecraft and the sparring of the couple, a bit like the gay couple or like Beatrice and Benedict. You know, I've seen that and it's well done, it's cleverly done and it's interesting. But I now find even more interesting, far more interesting,

these people on the edge, these women who had very little opportunity, very little choice in the world and who clung on to that little class position above the working class without the joviality and the fun of the working class, but not able to have the self-confidence and enter the upper middle. Simon, I'd like to also say, I'll ask you, you know, you've written a lot about Gissing. So when did you first become aware of him as a writer? Well, I also came to Gissing young, also at university in my second year where they taught a paper called, I think it's been changed now, but we had eight weeks to do English literature and its background, 1830 to the present.

So, you know, my poor tutor, who's a D.H. Lawrence expert, had New Grub Street and an essay from me to speed read the day before our class on it. Like yourselves and like a lot of people who listen to the podcast, I'm fascinated by novels that are about novelists and about the process of writing. And I knew I liked Dickens and I was looking for something that was a bit like Dickens, which Gissing is, although the differences between them are really important. So I landed on New Grub Street, which I think I tell my students is the most depressing book about writing novels in the English language properly. So true. I was set New Grub Street as part of my English degree

and every time I sit down to write anything, I think about that book. It is so haunting. You're right. I haven't read it. I didn't reread it for this. I chose not to. I thought, no, I'll read another Gissing.

I won't read it. But it is the most, anyone who is interested in the world of books, publishing, writing, and what it's like to grind out a three-volume novel needs to read New Grub Street. John, you'd never read it before. No, I'm really pleased that I read it because it gives a kind of a perspective on the odd women, which I think in some ways might be, I mean, not a better novel, but, you know, it's kind of, it's less,

you feel that it's less obviously autobiographical. If you for any reason haven't read that book, please read it. Please do. It's still, 130 years later, the most brilliantly perceptive and accurate account of writing for money. I just wanted to add the way it foreshadows the creative writing industry. Ralph Gale says that he can teach novel writing in 10 easy lessons. So, John, I just want to get this in quickly so people know so we're dealt with new grub strip

we're talking about the odd women and uh this being backlisted i'm just going to read the blurb from the back of the virago modern classics edition from 1980 one of the few books by a man published by virago uh for the reasons that Jan was just talking about. We'll come on to how feminist is it as a question in due course, but certainly it resonated in that era particularly because it's so rare for women in that situation to have been treated with any degree of seriousness by any writer. situation to have been treated with any degree of seriousness by any writer. So here is the blurb on the back of the 1980 Virago modern classic. There's a quote to kick it off.

Questions of marriage don't interest me much. My work and thoughts are for the women who do not marry. The odd women, I call them. And we should just say that the title, The Odd Women, And we should just say that the title, The Odd Women, refers both to leftover women and perhaps strange. There's a double meaning there. Set in London in the 1890s, this powerful novel tells the story of five of these odd women. Alice and Virginia Madden are reduced to genteel poverty by the death of their improvident father. Their pretty sister Monica chooses a loveless marriage to escape their fate. Rhoda Nunn and her friend Mary Barfoot devote their lives to helping young women find emotional as well as economic independence. Rhoda is the embodiment of all that was meant by the new woman,

Rhoda is the embodiment of all that was meant by the new woman. Brave, spirited, feminine, seeking not to reject men, but to create for both sexes new ways of living, new freedoms from old constraints, including, if necessary, marriage. Into her life comes Mary's engaging and forceful cousin, Everard. Mutually attracted, they are drawn into a passionate struggle for supremacy, from which Rhoda emerges with a new understanding of what love between man and woman can mean, and what its implications are for a woman determined also to be true to herself.

Wow. What do we think of that 40-year-old blurb? Well, I think up until the last sentence, that's pretty good. It goes a bit Hollywood just towards the end. It's somewhat true. I don't really agree with the vision or the description that we've had of Barfoot there. I don't think he comes across as roaders equal. Their discussion is always frivolous from his point of view. It's the erotic game.

So the notion that that was a serious discussion of feminism, it doesn't seem to me to ring true. I mean, I come at it obviously from Mary Wollstonecraft who struggled with precisely this business of passion and reason and so on, but also from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, where Henry Crawford decides to toy with the affections of the virtuous Fanny Price, just to see how she's going to respond to a girl who he thinks could not respond to such a sophisticated man as he is. And I see that Barfoot is doing some of the same.

And he gets entrapped. He enjoys the game and so starts to love, in fact. But what Giffing, I think, shows and what Jane Austen shows too is that temperament and nature don't just change like that. And so however much he goes on, how much he enjoys the game, however much he's entrammelled in actual sexual passion at one point, he's not going to change the way he is.

Argument is neither here nor there. But then that's kissing all over, isn't it? Mr Ambiguity. Ideology has no point on its own. Ideology has to be somehow rooted in experience. I found this very interesting, and I wonder what you think about this. This is from an essay that was written by Karen Chase in the 80s

about the feminism or not of the odd women. about the feminism or not of the odd women. This is just a couple of, just the opening paragraph. George Gissing has recently suffered the embarrassment of historical revision. In the last two decades, he has been rediscovered both as a proto-feminist and a misogynist. And since compelling evidence can be found on both sides, no point would be served by trying to fix Gissing's attitude with precision. Indeed, it is clear that Gissing possessed nothing so determinate as a precise attitude. His statements on the woman question were as awkward and confused as his relations with women.

That is wonderful. Well, I don't think that's particularly fair. I don't think a novelist has to take up positions. I think the whole point is that what he is doing is dramatising the arguments and dramatising the positions. And so, of course, one can't say exactly where he stands because he stands in whatever character is saying. He's with them. That's why he's such a good novelist, I think. So I wouldn't agree with that really at all.

To be fair to Karen Chase, she goes on to say, if he did not have sufficient moral weight to impose his opinions on the age, he was at least sufficiently impressionable to allow the age to impose on him. Now, I think that's pretty good. Simon, what do you think? That's good, I think. Yes, I think that's right. I think Gissing would always complain in his correspondence when he was still alive about views espoused by his characters as being views espoused by him. Just because one of my characters thinks this. And there's this passage late in the novel of a free and direct style

where we're shown his thoughts, where he's thinking about how great it would be to make a woman like Rhoda fall in love with him so that he could conquer and dominate her. And wouldn't it be great to conquer a woman like that rather than a woman that's much more of a pushover and i think there you get the sense both of guessing investing in the character but you know giving this character full voice but also the character being ironized as well too that there is both a negative capability to to invest in the character to you know to make them live and breathe but also also the moral engagement that helps the attentive reader see that he's a badden.

There is a similarity, I think, with Austen there too, if you think about the relationship between Emma and Austen's narrator too, and I think that's the real hallmark of Gissing's writing in the 90s. Before it all goes wrong, spoiler alerts obviously for people who haven't read the book, between Everard and Rhoda, spoiler alerts obviously for people who haven't read the book between everard and rhoda she herself uh you know in the in the at the moment when she's most you know up in the lake district marvelous marvelous to have a book that's got a bit of a trip to the lake district in it really excited me she says was he in truth capable of respecting her individuality? Or would his strong instinct of lordship urge him to direct his wife as a dependent to impose upon her his own view of things?

She doubted whether he had much genuine sympathy with women's emancipation as she understood it. So Rhoda, even at the moment when she's most attracted, she's accepted his proposal. She's already seeing through him that's one of the things i love that the psychological kind of nuance in the book is is is pretty is really finely done whatever gissing felt yes i don't think there is any answer to some of this anyway i mean having gone through i don't know how many waves of feminism, we keep coming back to the same problems. People are competitive with each other.

Any two people living together have to make all sorts of compromises that inevitably impinge on the individuality. So I think he's looking in the same way as Mary Wollstonecraft was in her writing. They're looking at human problems. And, yeah, he's a writer. He's showing what you can do with them. He's a writer about marriage. Yes.

Of his novels that I've read, they all seem to swing around that, really. And the horrors of it. Yes, the horrors of it yes the horrors of it but also what might be a solution to the marriage problem as he sees it that i i've read the novel that he wrote after the odd women and we must we should say he writes something like two dozen novels in 20 years it's a phenomenal work rate um but I read his novel In the Year of Jubilee, and that seems to be very much one of the things that that novel is about is how could a man and woman

be married but not live together in a way which would be acceptable to society? society. He seems to me to be very aware constantly of and pioneeringly what the economic value of such a union would be, not just to the man, which is what you might expect from a male novelist of that era, but to the woman as well. And that's one of the questions in The Odd Women. of that era, but to the woman as well. And that's one of the questions in The Odd Women. Yes. But he does think all the time that in a way there can be no absolute equality between any two people.

There's always this little struggle for mastery of some sort. The Odd Women is full of different types of marriage, isn't it? The Mickelthwaites are the sort of ideal couple, but that's a traditional marriage. It goes back to the form that works where the man has got finally brought in the money and keeps the woman and her sisters and this can work. And there are loads of other marriages which are disastrous. They're absurdly disastrous, some of them. I mean, I love the one who has to leave his family and children because his wife can't understand his jokes. And he's going mad with trying to explain himself year after year. And he finally just

can't do it any longer. And there's the other one who goes into the lunatic asylum because the woman goes on about the servants and what have I. It's full of these, but I think there's something deeper and that is that whatever it is, there is this little undercurrent of difficulty in all human relations. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 want to feel old? That was Sir Edward Elgar himself conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1933, his Serenade for Strings that was first performed publicly in 1893 and has probably just been on the proms, in fact.

in 1893 and has probably just been on the proms in fact. So Simon could you just tell us a bit about Gissing's career as a novelist? It's intense for a kind of 20 to 25 year period isn't it? Indeed yes and as you've said he's a tremendously prolific novelist you know he writes very quickly I've seen one Giss guessing manuscript where clearly there's not much time for going back and revising. He puts the stuff out because he's short of money and needs such income as novel writing can get him. So for the 1880s, he is one of the great writers of the working class. So Demos, The netherworld, fall into that period where he writes with, I think, both honest sympathy and honest revulsion about the class below him, if you think of Gissing as being a writer of the lower middle class. And the great break at the end of that period is the death of his first wife, the working class woman, the former prostitute whom he marries first. There's an extraordinary passage in his diary where he writes about the experience of going to see her dead body in her lodgings,

after which he goes abroad, travels, comes back and becomes the great writer of the middle class, particularly the lower middle class, where he writes novels like In the Year of Jubilee, The Odd Women, and also a novel which to me is his masterpiece, a novel called The Whirlpool, which Penguin put out a couple of years ago, edited by DJ Taylor, another meditation on different kinds of marriage and money and class. But I think the part of his career that's probably least well known is his short stories. That initially Gissing thought of the short story as being beneath him.

He wrote a few just to get money quickly in his very early life in America, but he thought that they were inartistic. If you were a proper novelist, you didn't write short stories. But when he started using an agent, the agent said, oh, it's a shame you don't use, shame you don't do short stories, George, because I could give you 17 guineas for an afternoon's work. So after Gissing becomes a father, he writes 80 to 100 short stories. And can we just say, was Gissing proud of his talent as a hack? Was hacking it out a thing that he took delight in? No, he actually took things very seriously.

And the experience of reading his diary, where he's very severe on other novelists that he thinks are not much good. So, you know, I'll how diary entries where he'll say, wrote 10 pages, not very good, read some Marie Carelli, it's even worse, great little day. You know, this is the kind of tone of so many of the entries of his diary. But he thinks if you are going to write novels, you should try really hard to write decent ones,

because he's very severe on writers, both of his generation and the previous generation, that he thinks aren't much good. And then just in the last few years before his death, he begins to experiment more. So he writes the private papers of Henry Rycroft, which I like less, but for a lot of people it's their favourite Gissing book. It's almost plotless. It was also big in Japan.

Indeed it was, yes. Yes, it was a bestseller in Japan, that particular book, that hitherto unexploited market, for guessing. And at the time of his death, he was working on his first historical novel. So I think he was always pushing himself. This is, you know, someone that towards the end of his life was trying to learn Spanish so that he could read Don Quixote in the original language. So he was tremendously hardworking and serious. And so The Odd Women falls right in the sweet spot in the middle period, doesn't it?

Absolutely. He's living in Brixton, isn't he, at the time that it's written? I think... It was in Exeter, I thought he was living. I think that's right. He's in Brixton when it comes out and he writes it. Yes, but he lived in Exeter while he wrote it. When his second wife, he tries living outside of London.

You know, I'll get away from London, you know, and I'll try, you know, an honest life, you know, out in the sticks. But I think, you know, London draws him back because, like Dickens, he needs the streets of London for inspiration for his work, as you can see from this novel. What I love about Gissing is he loves writing about London and the suburbs. I'm always interested in the literature of the suburbs,

even if he doesn't like the suburbs, which of course he doesn't. But then he doesn't like London either. He's an equal opportunities author in that respect. But, Jan, have you got a bit you could read us from The Odd Women? Well, I have. I want to, because he goes on a little and time is short, I'm going to skip bits. But I wanted to take a bit that describes the life

of the two Madden sisters who don't marry. There were six of them originally. They are an ill-fated lot as one drowns herself, one dies of consumption and so on. Anyway, the three are left and the pretty one, of course, marries and enters this dreadful union. But the other two are left. And I love the specificity of their very impoverished and narrow life, what they eat.

I mean, the eating is extraordinary. I think it's Mildred who is having her supper of potato with salt and Virginia, who's got a sort of bed sit into which Alice moves, a little room, has got a kettle and a saucepan on which she has to cook everything. They have rice with a little butter on it. And that's their evening meal. And the result of this is that they are totally undernourished,

all of them, both of them. And they're wonderful descriptions of their sort of ageing. They're only 33 or 34 and they're ageing and their flabby skin and their wrinkles. And he's very, I think he's horribly attuned to the ageing female body, I think. I think he rather overdoes some of it. They've got puffy cheeks and they've got endless, anyway, it goes on.

But it's to do with poverty. It's to do with the fact that they simply don't have enough to eat. So, anyway, it goes on. But it's to do with poverty. It's to do with the fact that they simply don't have enough to eat. So anyway, this is a little bit. They've moved in together. They've got a little inheritance, a very small one, that gives them a dividend, and they're so afraid to touch the money that they don't do the one thing they might do, which is perhaps try and start a school if they had a little more

umption about them in the way that Mary Wollstonecraft does a hundred years earlier. Surely, Alice began by murmuring half absently, I shall soon hear of something. I'm dreadfully uneasy on my own account, her sister replied. You think the person at Southend won't write again? I'm afraid not. And she seems so very unsatisfactory. Positively illiterate. Oh, I couldn't bear that. Virginia gave a shudder as she spoke. I almost wish, said Alice, that I had accepted the place at Plymouth. Oh, my dear, five children and not a penny of salary. It was a shameless proposal. It was indeed, sighed the poor governess.

But there's so little choice for people like myself. I know it will end in my taking a place without salary. People seem to have still less need of me, lamented the companion. Then they go on. Supposing we neither of us obtained employment before the end of the year, we have to live, in that case, more than six months, you on seven pounds and I on ten. It's impossible, said Virginia. Let us see. Put it in another form. We have both to live together on seventeen pounds.

That is, she made a computation on a piece of paper, that is two pounds, sixteen shillings and eight pence a month. Let us suppose this month at an end. That represents 16 shillings and eight pence a month. Let us suppose this month at an end. That represents 14 shillings and tuppence a week. Yes, we can do it. She laid down her pencil with an air of triumph. Her dull eyes brightened as though she had discovered a new source of income. We cannot, dear, urged Virginia in a subdued voice.

Seven shillings rent. That leaves only seven and tuppence a week for everything. Everything. We could do it, dear, persisted the other, if it came to the very worst. Our food need not cost more than six pence a day. Three and six a week. I do really believe, Virgie, we could support life on less.

Say, on four pence. Yes, we could, dear. Whatever happens, my dear, said Alice presently. I'm nearly stopping here. With all the impressiveness of tone she could command, we must never entrench upon our capital. Never, never. Oh, never.

We grow old and useless. If no one will give us even board and lodging for our services, if we haven't a friend to look to, Alice threw in, as though they were answering each other in a doleful litany. Then indeed, we shall be glad that nothing tempted us to entrench on our capital. It would keep, just keep us, her voice sank from the workhouse. At nine o'clock, they took a cup of cocoa and a biscuit and half an hour later, they went to bed. Lamp oil was costly and indeed they felt glad to say, as early as possible, that another day had gone by.

As early as possible. That's wonderful, right? It reminded me, Jan, of Orwell's famous description of the theme of all Gissing's novels. It's three words, not enough money. Not enough money, yes. But especially for the educated, refined person. I mean, that's the horror, isn't it?

So the working class gets a little bit of money and it goes to the pub and has fun, at least has that little period of fun. But this group can't even do that. They can't take themselves out of it. Simon, Gisving has the traditional for its period ambivalence towards the thing Jan was just talking about. You know, like Forster in Howard's End, a sort of hostility or

ambivalence about the clerks, the lower middle class, even trying to better themselves. That description of him as being a symptom rather than a cause, if you like, that he's able to contain multitudes, if you will. You know, he's able to both be excited by the idea of education and emancipation, but also pessimistic about what will happen to these people who have no outlet for this undirected culture. Absolutely. And I think Gissing would say, you know, that's not his fault. That's the world's fault, you know, because he is a realist novelist. So he portrays the world as he sees it. And if the world makes false promises to particularly gifted individuals, then it's his role to expose the falsity of those promises that, you know, his novels are complex and

self-contradictory and ambiguous because the world as he sees it is complex and self-contradictory and ambiguous. And indeed, his characters are those things as well, too. Kissing is great at writing characters who can't do the thing that will help themselves. But who in life does? Which of us does? You know, we're all these seeming masses. Exactly. And he was a friend of Wells, H.G. Wells. And there's a wonderful thing that Wells masses exactly and he he was a friend of wells hg wells and there's a wonderful thing that wells says he said he was a pessimistic writer he spent his big

fine brain depreciating life because he would not and perhaps could not look life squarely in the eyes neither his circumstances nor the conventions about him nor the adverse things about him nor the limitations of his personal character but But whether it's nature or education that made this tragedy, I cannot tell. But that's an interesting idea, isn't it? He looks at the world, he observes the world, but it's a silly thing to say that his best writing goes into his novels. But I found this all the way through. The more I read about Gissing, the more I found him quite personally difficult to like. But the more brilliant I think that makes makes him as a novelist yes yes he has Trollope's facility for production but is far more splenetic than Trollope is I'd read in the year of Jubilee

and one of the things I noticed in the year of jubilee is i'm absolutely convinced that he's written it so fast that he's forgotten to include a scene that he refers to a scene later in the book which i went back and looked for and definitely isn't there because he's moving so quick while he writes. He's so involved with the narrative. Simon, do we know how much planning he did or is he improvising on a theme? I think he's improvising on a theme. I've never come across any notes for novels that I think he sits down

and he writes them, you know, at a jog. Didn't he say that he wrote New Grub Street in six weeks? Something like that, yes. So that it was a rush and he didn't think that much of it. I think that's possibly why it has a slightly happier ending than most of them. It's gloomy, but it's not that gloomy. I mean, yes, somebody's dead and somebody's this, but they aren't all dead. You just didn't have time. Would anyone care to hazard a guess who wrote that in 1893? You're right to be silent. I've no idea.

Sibelius. Well, very good. Good Lord. Sibelius is impromptu number two in G minor, opus five. So it's a very early piano piece by Sibelius. But that's how long ago we are. We're in a world where Sibelius and Elgar are both young. These are very early pieces.

Simon, was there a part of the Odd Women that you'd chosen to share with us? Yes, I wanted to pick on this one because I'd said I was interested about writers on writing. So this is Rhoda Nunn and Mary Barfoot, who are the two leaders of this proto-feminist collective that's at the heart of the novel. So this is Gissing's new woman novel, his attempt to write about this figure of, you know,

what might educated women be if they're not going to be wives and mothers, you know, what roles might they find? So Rhoda and Mary set up an establishment that will help them train these half million extra odd women for better existences than some of the other characters experience. And they've decided to turn away a young woman, Miss Royston, from this collective. Personal feeling is misleading you, Rhoda pursued. Miss Royston had a certain cleverness, I grant, but do you think I didn't know that she would never become what you hoped? All her spare time was given to novel reading.

If every novelist could be strangled and thrown into the sea, we should have some chance of reforming women. The girl's nature was corrupted with sentimentality, like that of all but every woman who is intelligent enough to read what is called the best fiction, but not intelligent enough to understand its vice. Love, love, love. A sickening sameness of vulgarity.

What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists? They won't represent the actual world. It would be too dull for their readers. In real life, how many men and women fall in love? Not one in every 10,000, I am convinced. Not one married pair in 10,000 have felt for each other as two or three couples do in every novel. There is the sexual instinct, of course, but that is quite a different thing. The novelist daren't talk about that. The paltry creatures daren't tell the one truth that would be profitable. The result is that women imagine themselves noble and glorious when they are most near the animals.

This Miss Royston, when she rushed off to perdition, ten to one she had in mind some idiot heroine of a book. Now, of course, in this passage, Rhoda is going to be corrected because she will have the experience of falling in love later in the novel. So she she'll find out what it's like. But there is a there is a grain of truth in that. I was really struck rereading it this time where Rhoda says that one of the things they want to teach the young women who pass through the doors of their establishment is not to be sentimental. women not to be self-sacrificing because that's one of the things that you know that keeps them under the heel of Victorian patriarchy or you know the injustices of the of the world that they live in just as as Gissing at the same time as we've been saying wanted to write uh novels that were unsentimental that he would write novels that would that would feel that would you know enable

you to judge but would not let you off easily or would not let the characters off easily. It's a very sparing, sorry, unsparing rather, aesthetic. That quotation reminded me hugely of the reviews of Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about what she regarded as silly novels and which she said each of these novels has virtue rewarded with a coach and six. This was a very bad thing too. She had exactly that and that if a girl is going to grow up and be rational, she really must eschew that kind of fiction because otherwise she will be ruined for rational motherhood and ruined for any effort in independence. So it's very, very similar to what she said. Mind you, Mary Wilson-Gararp had her somewhat comeuppance also

in the way that Rhoda Nunn did. She too, of course, having preached rationality in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and perhaps missed out or felt that she could underplay the sexual desire of women, then, of course, fell very much into love and realised that the whole thing was rather more complicated than she thought. She never went back on the idea that rationality is required for women.

But nonetheless, she herself in her own life had some of the problems of Rhoda. I'd just like to ask both of you. the review, a contemporary review of the novel of The Odd Women from the Illustrated London News, written by Clementina Black in 1893. And it's a very positive review. She says it's the best novel that Mr. Gissing has so far written. But she goes on to complain about the ending. And I'm saying to listeners, if you haven't read the book, you may wish to fast forward by three minutes so there are no spoilers you've had 127 years but nevertheless we have to we have to warn you some of you anyway she questions the ending and she says this she describes uh rhoda's rejection of everard on the on the terms that she cites as being inconsistent and she says this this is the conduct of an ungenerous a selfish and especially an undisciplined woman and is out of keeping

with all the previous history of road and none. It would almost seem as if hatred of the conventional happy ending had led Mr Gissing to that same sacrifice of truthful portraiture into which so many of his predecessors have been betrayed by their love of it. Now that's pretty good. Very good, isn't it? It's really nice. That's pretty good for 1893. But what she says, which is really, really fascinating, happily in a good novel,

it is the impression of the best part which remains while the weaker pages fade away. And she goes on to specifically compare Gissing to Dickens. And she says, what we carry away from this novel, like we carry away from a Dickens novel, are the vivid moments rather than whatever quibbles we might have with the architecture of the whole. Is that a valid criticism of Gissing now, 120 blah years later, do you think?

I would certainly concur with Clementina Black about Gissing now, 120 blah years later, do you think? I would certainly concur with Clementina Black about Gissing's hatred of the happy ending because he spent his entire career demolishing the certainties of the Victorian happy ending. But I think it's, well, there's a couple of things. It's great because it asks, where is Rhoda going to go? What is she going to do at the end of this novel that won't diminish her?

I say to my students when I'm teaching The New Woman, you know, what The New Woman wants in the 1880s and 1890s, she wants to be educated. She wants to have a fulfilling career. She would like to have a fulfilling romantic and erotic existence. And she'd like to have children as well, maybe, without interfering with any of those. So let's not patronise the Victorians. Let's not imagine we've got all of these things fixed. We said we'd mention Edmund Widders, the dreadful stalker, Edmund Widderson. Yes.

Who reminded... I think he's wonderful. But as a character, Jan... It's just amazing. He reminded me of the similarly dreadful Ernest Eccles in Patrick Hamilton's 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, who makes a similar manoeuvre on a younger and vulnerable woman. Very good.

Yes. In the most sort of cringingly awful... Yes. And he can be moving. I love the bit where he's, when he first gets his house, which of course he loses by the end, he's lost everything through this marriage. I mean, he's not dead, which has to be said as his wife is,

but he's lost everything else. But what he loved most was his house. And remember when he got it, he said he walked around the empty house with nothing in it just to feel that this was his, that this was his place where his soul was and that he would never leave it. And there are bits like that that are really very moving and then there's a point where he actually comes close

to understanding himself and the absurdity of himself and then he pulls back from it. And off we get. We get this person who stalks the woman and his obsession and his surveillance. But it's a wonderful, I think, a depiction of addiction. I mean, he's addicted to her. He can't bear it. And he knows how absurd he is.

I mean, the book is full of people traipsing around London, isn't it? It's the most amazing. I have never heard so much about London buses and roads and trains. And that and the weather are two things that really have stuck it with me, the weather and the trains. But Edmund walks everywhere and he's so upset and he's so jealous and so miserable and all he can do is walk.

I think Gissing is one of the great poets of traipsing around London, as you say. He's also very good at bringing it back to insomnia. He's also very good at people who can't sleep well, waking up and wandering the streets to try and... Yes. I think we are... I think, I'm afraid, our lamp oil is running low and the evening draws on.

So we're going to have to bring this conversation sadly to a close. Wonderful. Huge thank you to Jan and to Simon for adding luster to the reputation of, I think we all agree, a still maybe underappreciated writer. to the reputation of, I think we all agree, a still maybe underappreciated writer, to Nicky Birch for weaving four feeds into one euphonious hole, and to Unbound for the omnibus fare home.

I'd like to just chip in and say to the listeners that I hadn't read a Gissing novel for 30 years, and having read both The Orb Women and In the Year of Jubilee relatively hard on the heels of one another they're so entertaining i just like to to to good yeah that the that that he keeps things trotting along in a in a totally as you pass from one scene of dreadful gloom to another. It's just, I so enjoyed reading them. Thank you both so much. It's true. And so, I mean, really interesting, stimulating.

And as I think we've said, the issues that he raises and kind of disinteres in The Odd Women, it's not like we've got this sorted out yet. These are big human questions that we still, anybody who's married or who lives with another person has has been through things that this novel shows you so and and so there's never been a better lockdown read you can download all 120 previous episodes of backlisted plus follow links clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at backlisted.fm and we're always pleased if you contact us on twitter or facebook

and now on instagram too you can also show your love directly by supporting our patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted we aim to survive without paid for advertising your generosity helps us do that all patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early, and for less than the price of a half bottle of Greengrocer's gin, lock listeners get to two extra lock listed a month. That academy of pleasurable pursuits where Andy, Nicky, and I share our reading, watching, looking, and listening for the general entertainment of all who subscribe. Lock listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show

as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. And we have a batch of you here. John, do you want to go first? Yeah, I'll go first. Sim, Jamie Jenkin, Emery Lee, Christopher J Hodges, Wendy Lothian, Catherine Previzer, Susan Fraser, Rebecca Kahn, Mia Moore, Glenn Davis, Jane McCabe, Steve Knight, Mary Foster, Evan Haining, Angela Dixon, Phil and Francis Babbage. Thank you so much, all of you. Thank you all very much. That's it. We will be back in a fortnight. Thank you all for listening. And to play us out, Nicky, could we have clip number six, and I will set it up.

And to play us out, we've heard music by men from 1893, but I thought it would be entirely appropriate and overdue for us to play out with a piece by a female composer an American called Amy Beach this was written in 1893 and first performed in 1893 there has never been to my knowledge a television adaptation of the odd women there should be and this should be the theme music for it uh it's called romance for violin and piano see you next time优优独播剧场——YoYo Television Series Exclusive Terima kasih. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted.

As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.