New Grub Street (1891), generally regarded as Gissing's finest novel, is the story of the daily lives and broken dreams of men and women forced to earn a living by the pen. With vivid realism it tells of a group of novelists, journalists, and scholars caught in the literary and cultural crisis that hit Britain in the closing years of the nineteenth century, as universal education, popular journalism, and mass communication began to leave their mark on the life of intellectuals. Projecting a strong sense of the London in which his characters struggle, Gissing also illuminates the valley of the shadow of books, where the spirit of alienation that created modernism was already stirring.

So many odd women — no making a pair with them. The idea of the superfluity of unmarried women was one the New Woman novels of the 1890s sought to challenge. But in The Odd Women (1893) Gissing satirizes the prevailing literary image of the New Woman and makes the point that unmarried women were generally viewed less as noble and romantic figures than as odd and marginal in relation to the ideal of womanhood itself. Set in grimy, fog-ridden London, these odd women range from the idealistic, financially self-sufficient Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn, who run a school to train young women in office skills for work, to the Madden sisters struggling to subsist in low-paid jobs and experiencing little comfort or pleasure in their lives. Yet it is for the youngest Madden sister's marriage that the novel reserves its most sinister critique. With superb detachment Gissing captures contemporary society's ambivalence towards its own period of transition. The Odd Women is a novel engaged with all the major sexual and social issues of the late-nineteenth century. Judged by contemporary reviewers as equal to Zola and Ibsen, Gissing was seen to have produced an intensely modern work and it is perhaps for this reason that the issues it raises remain the subject of contemporary debate.

This is a reissue of the previous World's Classics edition in the new, larger format and with the series name changed to Oxford World's Classics.