Monday, August 06, 2012
Odd Women
Following the notice on 19th July I have now finished kindling 'Odd Women' by George Gissing, BH having fallen by the wayside with her antique version from the library. Altogether too lugubrious to suit her just presently - and I stumbled a bit during the middle passage, which reminded me of the lecturing & hectoring tone of Tolstoy's 'Kreutzer Sonata', published just 4 years earlier and which shared a preoccupation with the women problem, clearly a hot topic at the time. Both authors recognised that the place of women in their world was not satisfactory.
I can see why Orwell would have liked Gissing, with Gissing having, in rather the same way as Orwell, a sharp eye for the various miseries of the lower middle class life of his time. A real compassion for the miserable lot of many single women, particularly those with pretensions but no means. I did not know, for example, that there were so many more women than men in England at that time - the odd women of the book's title. Gissing claims as many as half a million: I don't know how one decides how many of those were of a marrying age but if it was a significant proportion that is a lot of women condemned not to have husbands. I am reminded of the rather larger excess of men in the China of today. And I had forgotten, if I ever knew, how dreadful the working hours and conditions of the shop assistants in the bigger London shops were. Maybe things were not as bad as those portrayed in smaller, family businesses.
Fortunately, there is still a novel for me lurking in the lecturing; all is not lost because the women problem has moved on. A fine portrait of the matrimonial holes into which one can fall, in one case through too little thought (Monica) and in another through too much (Rhoda).
It is interesting to reflect on how the problem had moved on by the time that D H Lawrence got to 'Women in Love' thirty years later. I dare say Gissing would have found, and Orwell did find, his - Lawrence's that is - take rather tiresome. And ironic, that of the three, Lawrence was the one who came from the working class while writing about the rather different milieu (with their different interests) to which he had migrated.
On to 'The Nether World'.
PS: intrigued over breakfast by an advertisement from the John Hopkins University Press for a book called 'Practical Plans for Difficult Conversations in Medicine', written by one Robert Buckman, M.D., PhD. I wondered how many doctors read such a thing then found out that it might be a lot. Amazon is down to its last two copies and tells of a whole tribe of books with similar titles. An adjacent advertisement from the same publisher concerned the 'Ecological and Behavioural Models for the Study of Bats'. So how many people get to read both?
I can see why Orwell would have liked Gissing, with Gissing having, in rather the same way as Orwell, a sharp eye for the various miseries of the lower middle class life of his time. A real compassion for the miserable lot of many single women, particularly those with pretensions but no means. I did not know, for example, that there were so many more women than men in England at that time - the odd women of the book's title. Gissing claims as many as half a million: I don't know how one decides how many of those were of a marrying age but if it was a significant proportion that is a lot of women condemned not to have husbands. I am reminded of the rather larger excess of men in the China of today. And I had forgotten, if I ever knew, how dreadful the working hours and conditions of the shop assistants in the bigger London shops were. Maybe things were not as bad as those portrayed in smaller, family businesses.
Fortunately, there is still a novel for me lurking in the lecturing; all is not lost because the women problem has moved on. A fine portrait of the matrimonial holes into which one can fall, in one case through too little thought (Monica) and in another through too much (Rhoda).
It is interesting to reflect on how the problem had moved on by the time that D H Lawrence got to 'Women in Love' thirty years later. I dare say Gissing would have found, and Orwell did find, his - Lawrence's that is - take rather tiresome. And ironic, that of the three, Lawrence was the one who came from the working class while writing about the rather different milieu (with their different interests) to which he had migrated.
On to 'The Nether World'.
PS: intrigued over breakfast by an advertisement from the John Hopkins University Press for a book called 'Practical Plans for Difficult Conversations in Medicine', written by one Robert Buckman, M.D., PhD. I wondered how many doctors read such a thing then found out that it might be a lot. Amazon is down to its last two copies and tells of a whole tribe of books with similar titles. An adjacent advertisement from the same publisher concerned the 'Ecological and Behavioural Models for the Study of Bats'. So how many people get to read both?
# posted by Jim @ 1:18 AM 
