ABSTRACT
It would have been a real calamity if Mr Gissing had tried to palm off upon us under the guise of a novel, a treatise, or even a dialogue, on the Woman question. To an active mind like his, profoundly interested in the phenomena of the civilization round him, the danger must have been great. None the less, he has kept his story very free from sociological dialectic. To make a novel pivot on a sociological rather than what unquestioning fetish-worship calls a 'purely human' motive, is not at all the same thing as to write a narrative tract, after the manner of Mrs Humphry Ward or Sarah Grand. As the threads ofsociety are complicated more and more it is difficult to avoid this, and Zola and Ibsen have shown us that the widest and loosest ideas can be treated in a purely artistic way. Mr Gissing succeeds in doing this, though obviously not without a certain effort. His book represents the Woman question made flesh; his people live it instead oftalking it. His method is to take types that represent the question, or rather the fact, in all its divagations-the old love marriage, the marriage of convenience, the womanly old-maid, the emancipated woman, and all the rest; then to lnake them in a purely natural way develop that side ofthemselves that bears on the position ofwomen in the society ofto-day. Obviously the danger ofthe method lies in the difficulty ofkeeping the story together. On this count Mr Gissing has not been blameless in the past, and it is a palpable fault in The Odd Women that it tends to part into two divergent channels. That is the danger of taking too large an idea; it is too lax to bind all its modifications into an organic whole. But in our judgment Mr Gissing has succeeded as far as was possible in suggesting the general idea that puts all his characters on the same plane, and yet has not obtruded it so much as to make them counters in the game of sociology instead of living human beings.
