ABSTRACT
The appearance of the female white-collar worker in the George Gissing's fiction of the 1890s both testifies to the increasing acceptance of her place in the labour market and to the fears and fantasies which surrounded her entry into urban culture. Gissing's ambitious accounts of white-collar work constitute a broader, more economically grounded comparison between the working conditions and lifestyles associated with the shop and the office in the style of the social investigators. This chapter argues that in The Odd Women and Eve's Ransom Gissing seeks to provide alternative accounts of the modernity and liberation of the shop-girl and the type writer girl, in terms of both their participation in public entertainments and, for the latter, her allegiance to the developing feminist movement. The Odd Women shows how her independence, commitment to women's emancipation and involvement with a network of professional women anticipate the figure of the suffrage worker of early-twentieth-century fiction.
