ABSTRACT

Mr Gissing is a very prolific writer, for it cannot be six weeks since we reviewed his Born in Exile,* but one cannot grumble at a novelist for writing too often who gives us such excellent work as the book under notice. It distinctly marks a great advance in his art, showing him among the 'arriving' novelists of the day, if: indeed, he may not now be said already to have 'arrived'. There is always thought in Mr Gissing's books; sometimes more thought than action, but he has arrived at a happy and-artistic combination in the work under review. It is altogether a story of odd women, women who suffer in the dreadful whirl of English daily life, because the brutal truth is there are too many women to be married, and most of them are quite unfitted to realise for themselves that to be successful, to burst the bonds which encompass their narrow, sordid lives, they must be 'odd'. It is Rhoda Nunn's mission, and that of her friend Miss Barfoot (Mr Gissing's characters have invariably the strangest names and the ugliest), to work with and for the helpless women; the women who do not belong to the working classes, but are ten times weaker than the women of that class, and pitiably helpless. They help them to find occupations which the age readily admits women can adequately fill. And across Rhoda's almost stem life, so full is it of duty, comes a romance. She, like other women, has at last a proposal, and even though she determines to refuse it, yet the fact makes her stronger and happier in a way Mr Gissing has very delicately and beautifully shown. The other men and women ofthe story present various aspects ofthe marriage question,