The Odd Woman was published by Knopf in 1974 and established Godwin as one of the most intellectually sophisticated novelists of her generation. The title alludes to George Gissing’s 1893 novel The Odd Women (about unmarried women in Victorian England), and Godwin’s protagonist — Jane Clifford, a professor of Victorian literature at a Midwestern university — is deeply conscious of the parallels between her own situation and that of the women she studies.
Jane is thirty-two, unmarried, conducting an unsatisfying affair with a married art historian, and spending Thanksgiving at her family’s North Carolina home where her grandmother is dying. The novel moves between the family drama (the grandmother’s death forces confrontation with family myths and secrets) and Jane’s intellectual life (her reading of Gissing and other Victorian novelists provides a running commentary on her own choices). The interplay between literature and life — how novels shape our expectations, how we use fiction to understand and justify our experience — is Godwin’s real subject.
The novel is remarkable for its intellectual density — it engages seriously with Victorian fiction, with feminist theory (this is 1974, the height of second-wave feminism), and with the psychology of female selfhood — without ever becoming academic or dry. Jane is a vividly alive character, and her struggles are emotional as well as intellectual. The novel was a National Book Award finalist and marked Godwin’s emergence as a writer of the first rank.
Collecting The Odd Woman
First edition (Knopf, New York, 1974): Cloth binding, dust jacket. National Book Award finalist.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $5–$10