Odd Women? Spinsters, Lesbians and Widows in British Women's Fiction, 1850s-1930s

Were spinsters, lesbians and widows always stigmatised or ignored in women's writing from 1850 to the Second World War? Women outside heterosexual marriage in this period were seen as abnormal, superfluous, incomplete and threatening, whilst also being hailed as 'women of the future'. Before 1850 odd women were marginalised, minor characters, yet by the 1930s spinsters, lesbians and widows had become heroines. This book considers how Victorian and modernist women's writing challenged the heterosexual plot and reconfigured conceptualisations of public and private space in order to valorise female oddity. It offers queer readings of novels and stories by women writers, from Charlotte Brontë, Elisabeth Gaskell, Ella Hepworth Dixon, and Netta Syrett, to May Sinclair, E.H. Young, Radclyffe Hall, Clemence Dane, Winifred Holtby and Virginia Woolf. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary study tracks diverse representations of the odd woman in fiction and autobiographical accounts in relation to the rise of feminism. It illuminates singleness in the context of the suffrage campaign, women's work, sexual inversion, and birth control, as well as assessing the impact of the First World War. It draws on advice literature, medical texts, feminist polemic and articles from the new women's magazines. Developing debates within queer theory about gender nonconformity, heteronormativity and relationships between women, this genealogy of the odd woman shows how new conceptualisations of female singleness and lesbianism troubled, and ultimately transformed, social norms. It will be essential to those working on Victorianism and modernism, and appeal to readers interested in female autobiography, modernity and the family.