THE GEORGE GISSING WEBSITE
English Novelist and Man of Letters (1857-1903)

This site celebrates Gissing's achievement and publishes material on Gissing's life and works. It also acts as a clearing-house for information about Gissing studies.

 

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 Italy, By the Ionian Sea, has many admirers, as does the product of his last years, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, the curious part-fictional set of reminiscences of a retired writer.

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 of his achievement. It's generously illustrated with extracts from his work and from his critics'.


More on Gissing: Index to this Site

The Works
E-texts: Thanks to Mitsuharu Matsuoka's heroic efforts, virtually all of Gissing's texts are available in this form.

Biography

Criticism and Appreciation

The Unclassed
Constance Harsh, "George Gissing's The Unclassed and the perils of naturalism" first appeared in ELH in 1992.

Thyrza
Constance Harsh, "George Gissing's Thyrza: Romantic love and ideological co-conspiracy," first appeared in the Gissing Journal in 1994.

In the Year of Jubilee
Paul Delany's introduction to a new edition of this under-rated novel discusses its panoramic treatment of life in London and the expanding suburbs in the 1890s, and its examination of late Victorian feminism and the marriage debate.

The Odd Women
A review of the new (1998) Broadview edition with introduction, notes and secondary reading by Arlene Young.

The Letters
A review of vols.1 & 2 of the Collected Letters of George Gissing (1990-91).

Gissing and George Orwell
The now-complete Complete Works of George Orwell (ed Davison, 1986-1998) allow us to trace Orwell's considerable debt to Gissing in detail. Here is a review-essay on the subject.

Research and other Gissing news

 


This site is maintained by Peter Morton.
It is recommended & approved by the BBC Education Web Guide for the use of tertiary students.
I am grateful for permission to publish copyright material.

Last updated: 3 Mar 2006