Monica, determined to elope with Bevis, goes there.

Crucially, Bevis lives in the same building as Everard Barfoot. Married Monica meets Bevis, a young, middle-class man who pursues her and represents for her the romantic ideal from popular novels. Despite being implacably hostile to marriage, she decides to indulge him with a view to turning down any marriage proposal to show her solidarity with her 'odd women'. Meanwhile, Mary Barfoot's rakish cousin Everard decides to court Rhoda initially as a challenge to her avowed dislike of love and marriage, but he later falls in love with her for her intellectual independence, which he finds preferable to the average uneducated woman's inanity. His ardent love turns into jealous obsession suffocating Monica's life. She is, in modern terms, 'stalked' by a middle-aged bachelor Edmund Widdowson, and he eventually brow-beats her into marriage. Monica Madden, the younger and prettier sister, is living-in above a shop in London. She is living with the also unmarried Mary Barfoot, and together they run an establishment teaching secretarial skills to young middle-class women remaindered in the marriage equation. After various travails, the adult Alice and Virginia Madden move to London and renew their friendship with Rhoda, an unmarried bluestocking. The novel begins with the Madden sisters and their childhood friend in Clevedon. A cross-section of women dealing with this problem are described in the book and it can be inferred that their lifestyles also set them apart as odd in the sense of strange.

This meant there were 'odd' women left over at the end of the equation when the other men and women had paired off in marriage. The novel's title is derived ostensibly from the notion that there was an excess of one million women over men in Victorian England. Its themes are the role of women in society, marriage, morals and the early feminist movement. The Odd Women is an 1893 novel by the English novelist George Gissing.

The Odd Women by George Gissing