The Odd Women by George Gissing

I have no idea why I read this book all the way through, no one was forcing me to it. I read New Grub Street (Gissing's best-known novel) a couple of years ago and quite liked it, so I thought I would like this one too. I found the bleakness and style incredibly oppressive. Gissing is so stiflingly staid and Victorian and steeped in the dullest kind of realism, while trying to be 'progressive' about The Woman Issue. He analyses his characters to a nauseating degree, so that I had no sympathy with any of them. I thought every single character horribly dull and weak, and didn't care at all about any of the awful things that happened to them. Gissing somehow managed to make even things like alcoholism and jealous rages profoundly boring and emotionless. His voice is so interfering and didactic, judging and appraising every action of the characters and every facet of their personality. He also is really awful at dialogue, some of the portrayals of conversations among shop-girls were especially unconvincing. It seems like he is obsessed with trying to imagine how and what women talk about amongst themselves, but everything comes out horribly stilted. By far my favourite line from this novel was 'the passions of her flesh torturing her until she thought of death as a refuge' (read: 'she wanted sex so much that she was contemplating suicide'). While I appreciate that with phrases like this, Gissing was trying to say that women also have sexual instincts (apparently a very bold claim in the late Victorian era), this is really too ridiculous.