Alice and Virginia Madden move to London and renew their friendship with Rhoda, an unmarried bluestocking. 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.George Robert Gissing was an English novelist, a teacher and tutor throughout his life. He failed to get his first novel accepted by a publisher, and so published it privately, funding it with money from an inheritance. He published his first novel, Workers in the Dawn, in 1880 and later produced over twenty novels during his literary career becoming one of the most popular writers.