New Grub Street

George Gissing's best-known novel shows us the literary underbelly of Victorian England, and the writers striving to forge their reputations in 'the street of no shame'.

New Grub Street...remains to this day the most devastating fictive portrayal of the conflict between materialism and idealism in the literary and journalistic worlds

It is George Gissing's triumph, in New Grub Street to have written a novel about writing for a living which is as graphic, as realistic and as dispiriting in its way as anything written by Emile Zola on the plight of coalminers

New Grub Street is not a very cheerful book, but as a study in the pathology of the literary life it is unequalled, and still surprisingly relevant

At his best Gissing is a very subtle psychologist, and his best scenes emerge out of a painstaking unravelling of human motivation... His work has a kind of integrity, a sort of emotional jaggedness, sufficient to set it apart from most of the comfortable productions of the late-Victorian reading-room

New Grub Street has an ominously up-to-date air

Important... New Grub Street is Victorian in its realist depiction of a society in transition, but modern in its portrait of the artist as an existentialist character making his solitary way in the world

·         A great novel about creativity and money and marriage, and its greatness lies in the subtlety with which these three subjects become co-dependent on one another

Gissing…deserves to be more widely read. He is at his best describing the hardship and disappointments faced by the less well-off, striving in the face of an unforgiving Victorian Society

Gissing’s insights into both the media and the effects of poverty still seem astonishingly fresh and current… Utterly compelling

George Robert Gissing was born on 22 November 1857 in Yorkshire. His father, a chemist, died when Gissing was twelve, leaving his family in relative poverty. However, Gissing won a scholarship to Owens College, Manchester and was destined for university, until he was caught stealing and sentenced to a month’s hard labour. He was stealing in order to support Nell Harrison, a prostitute with who he had fallen in love, and whom he married on his return from imprisonment and a short sojourn in America in 1877. He worked as a private tutor while writing his first novel, Workers in the Dawn, which was published in 1880 to little acclaim. Gissing’s marriage became increasingly unhappy and he separated from Nell in 1883 – she died several years later. Six more novels followed between 1884 and 1889, which were also largely overlooked, but allowed Gissing to fund a long-held ambition to visit Italy in 1889. In 1890 he married again, and in the following year published his most famous work, New Grub Street, and three more novels which won him moderate literary acclaim: The Odd Women, Born in Exile and In the Year of Jubilee. In 1897, already suffering from the emphysema that would eventually end his life, and separated from his second wife and children, Gissing met and fell in love with his French translator, Gabrielle Fleury. Unable to obtain a divorce, he moved to live with her in France. There he wrote several more novels, travel books and a life of Dickens. George Gissing died at St Jean-de-Luz in France on 28 December 1903, aged forty-six.

George Gissing's best-known novel shows us the literary underbelly of Victorian England, and the writers striving to forge their reputations in 'the street of no shame'. 
 
 ‘As a study in the pathology of the literary life it is unequalled, and still surprisingly relevant’ David Lodge, Independent 
 
 
Grub Street - where would-be writers aim high, publishers plumb the depths and literature is a trade, never a calling. In a literary world disfigured by greed and explotation, two very different writers rise and fall: Edward Reardon, a novelist whose high standards prevent him from pandering to the common taste, and Jasper Milvain, who possesses no such scruples. Gissing's dark and darkly funny novel presents a little-seen but richly absorbing slice of nineteeth-century society. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANTHONY QUINN

'If only I had the skill, I would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies' 
 
In New Grub Street George Gissing re-created a microcosm of London's literary society as he had experienced it. His novel is at once a major social document and a story that draws us irresistibly into the twilit world of Edwin Reardon, a struggling novelist, and his friends and acquaintances in Grub Street including Jasper Milvain, an ambitious journalist, and Alfred Yule, an embittered critic. Here Gissing brings to life the bitter battles (fought out in obscure garrets or in the Reading Room of the British Museum) between integrity and the dictates of the market place, the miseries of genteel poverty and the damage that failure and hardship do to human personality and relationships. 
 
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

George Gissing was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1857. A brilliant but solitary student, his prize-winning academic career was cut short when he stole money from fellow students in order to keep a young orphaned prostitute, Marianne (Nell) Harrison, from the streets. After a month of hard labour in Belle Vue Gaol, Manchester, he moved to the United States where he worked as both a teacher of classics in Massachusetts and later a travelling salesman's assistant in Chicago, the experience of which informed New Grub Street. Once back in London, Gissing worked as a tutor and writer. After two short and ill-fated marriages, first to Nell and then to the volatile and violent Edith Underwood, Gissing lived in France with the translator Gabrielle Fleury. By the end of the 1890s he had established a very strong literary reputation, and finally achieved financial security. 
 
Gissing produced powerfully realistic novels that illumined the bleak life of the English underclass, the injustice of society and the plight of women. Often hailed as the greatest of the English realist novelists, Gissing had published over twenty books by the time of his death in the Pyrenees in 1903.

The Odd Women

Elaine Showalter's introduction considers the position of single women in Victorian society and Gissing's own complex and contradictory attitude towards feminism, sexuality and marriage.

Virginia and Alice Madden are 'odd women', growing old alone in Victorian England with no prospect of finding love. Forced into poverty by the sudden death of their father, they lead lives of quiet desperation in a genteel boarding house in London.  Meanwhile, their younger sister Monica, struggles to endure a loveless marriage she agreed to as her only escape from spinsterhood. But when the Maddens meet an old friend, Rhoda Nunn, they are soon made aware of the depth of their oppression. Astonishingly ahead of its time, The Odd Women is a pioneering work of early feminism. Gissing's depiction of the daring feminist Rhoda Nunn, it is an unflinching portrayal of one woman's struggle to reconcile her own desires with her deepest principles.

In New Grub Street George Gissing re-created a microcosm of London's literary society as he had experienced it. His novel is at once a major social document and a story that draws us irresistibly into the twilit world of Edwin Reardon, a struggling novelist, and his friends and acquaintances in Grub Street including Jasper Milvain, an ambitious journalist, and Alfred Yule, an embittered critic. Here Gissing brings to life the bitter battles (fought out in obscure garrets or in the Reading Room of the British Museum) between integrity and the dictates of the market place, the miseries of genteel poverty and the damage that failure and hardship do to human personality and relationships.

George Gissing

The Whirlpool

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