In 1898, Gissing met the woman
with whom he was to spend his last years. Gabrielle Fleury (1868-1954) was a
middle-class Frenchwoman who wrote to him seeking his permission to translate
New Grub Street. In the summer of 1899 they spent some months in
Switzerland before settling in Gabrielle's flat in Paris.
During the next few years, happy, though plagued by
illness, Gissing wrote The Crown of Life (1899), Our Friend the Charlatan
(1901) and the last of his novels of modern life, Will Warburton, which was
published posthumously in 1905.
During his travels abroad, Gissing
continued to write to his friends in England. In this letter to a former school
friend, Henry Hick, Gissing refers to his book The Private Papers of Henry
Ryecroft. This is one of his most celebrated works and the last to be
published in his lifetime (1903), it takes the form of the diary of a retired
author and draws on many philosophical and biographical threads from his own
life.
Though the book was a success, Gissing writes "Many
thanks ... for the kind things you say about "Ryecroft." I hoped the
book was going to sell, but 3000 copies in England seem to be about the extent
of my public - & if you like to calculate what 3000 shillings amount to,
you will see what a literary "success" means." Since
Gissing's death there have been many editions in several languages.
In 1903, Gissing was working on his long
planned historical romance, Veranilda, which was published posthumously in
1904. Begun in December 1900, it was originally titled 'A Vanquished
Roman'. This extensively researched historical romance sees a marked
departure from the critique of Victorian society which characterised his
earlier novels.
Of these heavily annotated manuscript pages, six
are of the first draft of chapter one. The final pages, being the last two
pages of the novel, were discovered quite by chance between sheets of his
blotting paper, by Gabrielle Fleury in 1929.
In 1937, Alfred Gissing wrote of his father's work on the
novel:
"In his English he strove hard after perfection
and every touch of revision brought him perceptibly nearer to it... his one
great lifelong ambition was all but achieved, and that in Veranilda we have the
outcome of an aspect of his genius which until then had been almost submerged
beneath a sea of troubles." ('Gissing's Unfinished Romance', National
Review CVIIIi Jan 1937).
Unfortunately, Gissing was never to finish this novel. He
died of myocarditis on 28 December 1903, aged 46. He was buried at the cemetery
at St Jean-de-Luz, France, on 30 December 1903.
In 1946 Rosalind Williams (1865-1949), a
one time friend of George Gissing, wrote of him
"Gissing was a very different type of man. Broad
shouldered and powerfully made he had a leonine head and a profusion of reddish
brown hair which surmounted his broad forehead. His sad rather weary looking
eyes deep set under prominent eyebrows seemed to gaze with pity on all the
sorrows of the world and mankind. But the singular sweetness of his mouth
belied the tragic bitterness of his eyes. He talked in a low melodious voice
often fast and eagerly then relapsed into silence and became absorbed in a
brooding melancholy."
Source: The University of Manchester