BIOGRAPHY
George Gissing was
a late-Victorian English writer best remembered for his novels New Grub
Street and The Odd Women, but these are the highlights of a career
which, though short, was marked by relentless industry: he wrote another 21
novels, more than a hundred short stories, a travel book, literary criticism,
essays, and enough letters to fill several volumes. The details of his private
life, which for much of his time was very unhappy, have fascinated generations
of readers; it is covered here in a brief
biographical sketch.
Though he came from a middle-class provincial background (his father was
a chemist in Wakefield) and was originally destined for an academic career,
Gissing's first novels, published in the 1880s, were grimly realistic studies
of London slum life, which Gissing perforce knew at first hand: the best are The
Unclassed, Thyrza and The Nether World.
The novels of his middle period deal more with the various phases of
English middle class life (usually the lower levels) and the social problems of
the day. Some of the themes which Gissing treated are: struggling authors and
their financial and marital difficulties in his masterpiece, New Grub Street;
the lack of opportunities for well-educated single women in The Odd Women;
the attempt, in Born in Exile, of an intelligent but poor man to
ingratiate himself with an upper class cultured family by pretending to have
religious views which he really despises; an attack on conventional marriage
and on suburban pretension in In the Year
of Jubilee; and a study of various kinds of corruption among the artistic
moneyed classes in The Whirlpool. His account of a visit to the
impoverished south of
Gissing's present reputation is that he is in the
upper second division of late Victorian writers. Some readers are repelled by
his gloom; others find the personal relationship he seems to strike up with the
reader most appealing. Most agree that his work offers unique insights into the
life of his times, including what it meant to be a not very successful writer at
the close of the nineteenth century. Several of his novels are readily
available in paperback.
If you want to discover more about the kind of writer
that Gissing was, please consult this critical survey achievement. It's
generously illustrated with extracts from his work and from his critics'.
Source: THE GEORGE
GISSING WEBSITE