say to yourself: this and that it is in me to do, and I will do it!

the odd women (george gissing, 1893)

the man, the moustache

For years, the main distinction that George Gissing’s book The Odd Women possessed, vis-a-vis myself, was that it was one of the first books I can remember deliberately not finishing (as opposed to forgetting to finish it, which happens all the time). I found something about Gissing’s descriptions of people, what they looked like, very off-putting.¹ But I did look up how it ended at the time and was interested to see it makes the short list of what I consider a canon of refusal: books in which a woman is offered love and marriage from a sympathetic man and says no.²

This kind of ending is rarer than you might think. The Princess of Cleves (1678) ends this way, as does Letters from a Peruvian Woman (1747)—those two classics to be found on every girl’s nightstand, I’m sure—and probably something else does but I can’t think of it right now.

The gender-flipped version of this ending (man renounces woman) is much more normal—thanks ma’am but I reckon I cain’t be domestic…