In 1890s London, sisters Virginia, Alice, and Monica are our guides to the world of “Odd Women,” those “unpaired” and unasseted young women who have to make their way without resources of education, male protection, or legal rights. As the sister with the most promise, Monica’s journey is at the center of the story; she takes a job as a shop-girl, working six 13-hour days a week on her feet, 51 weeks a year, and begins to conceive of marriage as her only likely escape from the fate of her older sisters, who are slowly succumbing to penury, ill health, loneliness, and joylessness, despite their best efforts. Monica quickly gives in to the attentions of the lonely but distinguished Mr. Widdowson and abandons her single life for the prison that marriage becomes with him. Gissing’s book explores marriage in all its dimensions, but he’s particularly interested in how Victorian women’s economic and legal dependency distorts the institution. He presents other alternatives, particularly in the characters of Rhoda Nunn and Mary Barfoot, two “New Women” whose charitable school trains young women for genteel work as secretaries (then mainly a male profession) where they might improve their minds and earn some kind of freedom. Nunn and Barfoot are the vanguard of a kind of “sexual [AKA gender] anarchy,” in which women can begin to explore their human potential more fully. But it takes an extraordinary woman to break free of social convention; ‘The Odd Women’ demonstrates how messy—and how slow—change is.