The Odd Women

When their father’s death leaves them with no money and a dim future, the Madden sisters, Alice, Virginia, and Monica, must negotiate the gender roles and class constraints of 1890s Victorian London.

Virginia and Alice have aged out of the possibility of marriage and seemingly the idea of love itself. They find themselves with few prospects and little hope. Remaindered in the marriage equation, these 'odd women' face a great deal of scrutiny, stigma, and social pressure – it’s at this time that Rhoda Nunn, childhood friend to the Madden sisters, arrives in London to challenge accepted norms and mores around the role of women in society. Rhoda’s strong feminist passion draws a sharp contrast to the middle-class respectability of the Madden sisters’ upbring, as the sisters watch a new world emerge around them.

About the Authors

George Gissing (1857-1903) was an English novelist, who published twenty-three novels between 1880 and 1903. Meagrely successful in his lifetime, by the 1940s he had been recognized as a literary genius, with George Orwell pronouncing that 'England has produced few better novelists'.

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker.

Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and The New York Review of Books. He is a Contributing Fiction Editor of the Yale Review and serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. Adam is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University.

Allison Miriam Smith is a co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. She is also an Acquiring Editor and Publishing & Publicity Manager for Unnamed Press. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she was an assistant curator for the USC Doheny Library George Cassady Lewis Carroll Special Collection. She later went on to earn a Masters in 18th & 19th c. Literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, working nights at the library. Before Unnamed Press, she was a bookseller at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, CA.

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is an Acquiring Editor at Unnamed Press and co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics.