Odd women?: spinsters, lesbians and widows in British women's fiction, 1850s-1930s

Women outside marriage between 1850 and the Second World War were seen as abnormal, threatening, superfluous, and incomplete, 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.