The Odd Woman
This was my first Gail Godwin, and I’m not quite sure why I finally picked it up. Perhaps it was my decision to pick up something by Rumer Godden, its neighbour on the library shelves? The GoodReads reviews of The Odd Woman were quite mixed and I wasn’t too sure if I had made the right choice in picking up this brown hardback without a dust cover (yeah I’m a sucker for a nice cover, which is why I love the Caustic Cover Critic). But the first few page of the book interested me. It opens with insomnia:
“On a mid-January morning in the early nineteen-seventies, at 2 A.M., Central Standard Time, Jane Clifford lay awake in a Midwestern university town, thinking about insomnia: traditions of insomnia, all the people she knew who had it, the poets and artists and saints who had left written testimonies of their sleeplessness.”
So that was the first sentence. Interesting enough, but the end of that paragraph was what really captured me, and I knew that this Jane Clifford would be a character I would want to read about:
“Her profession was words and she believed in them deeply. The articulation, interpretation, appreciation and preservation of good words. She believed in their power. If you truly named something. You had that degree of control over it. Words could incite, soothe, destroy, exorcise, redeem. Putting a nebulous ‘something’ into precise words often made it so – or not so. The right word or the wrong word could change a person’s life, the course of the world. If you called things by their name, you had more control of your life, and she liked to be in control.”
Jane Clifford is the odd woman, the single woman, an academic, teaching 19th century novels such as George Gissing’s The Odd Women in courses like Women in Literature. I’ve never read The Odd Women (have you?) but Jane describes it as “one of the few nineteenth-century novels she could think of in which every main female character who was allowed to live through the last page had to do so alone. The book’s ending depressed her utterly, and she was eager to fling it into a classroom of young women (and men?) who still believed they would get everything and see how they would deal with Gissing’s assurance that they certainly would not”.
Jane seems to belong in the 19th century. She longs for the romance and melodrama of it all. She is having an affair with a married academic (in a different university, different town), who is mentioned at the start, but whom we meet only about halfway through the book (he turns out to be quite boring). Her life is about her books, but when her beloved grandmother, Edith, passes away early on in the story, she has to head home for the funeral, to her family, to the family stories she tries to understand, and to real life.
The Odd Woman is a bit of a complex story (also involving her long dead great aunt Cleva and her ‘villain’ – that’s the melodrama she’s looking for) and requires a bit of patience (it’s not a page turner, more of a reflective narrative). But what great characters! While the male characters are rather unsympathetically drawn and quite hard to like (I really didn’t like Gabriel Weeks, Jane’s lover), the female characters and their relationships with Jane make for great reading. I especially enjoyed reading about Jane’s relationships with her sister and with Edith. I really quite enjoyed this book and Jane and her love for books is something that will stay with me for quite some time.
I am curious though, should I read George Gissing’s The Odd Women? Have you read it and would you recommend it? And have read Gail Godwin’s other books before? What would you recommend?
* The Perfectionists (1970)
* A Sorrowful Woman (1971)
* Glass People (1972)
* The Odd Woman (1974) (National Book Award nominee)
* Dream Children (1976) (collection)
* Violet Clay (1978) (National Book Award nominee)
* A Mother and Two Daughters (1982) (National Book Award nominee)
* Mr. Bedford and the Muses (1983) (collection)
* The Finishing School (1984)
* A Southern Family (1987)
* Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991)
* The Good Husband
* Evensong (1999)
* Heart (2001) (nonfiction)
* Evenings at Five (2003)
* Queen of the Underworld (2006)
* The Making of a Writer (2006) (nonfiction, ed. Rob Neufeld)
* Unfinished Desires (2010)
I haven’t read The Odd Women but I want to (and New Grub Street). I also haven’t read much Gail Godwin, only Evenings at Five, which is a slim volume and I understand, now, that it’s not the best place to start with her work, not very representative. I have a couple of others here though, so I’m looking forward to reading the comments here.
I am pretty curious about The Odd Women, especially since it’s mentioned quite a bit in The Odd Woman (I feel like I should add an emphasis to the ‘a’ and ‘e’ difference). I remember now why I picked up Godwin’s The Odd Woman specifically – it was mentioned in Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust!