GEORGE GISSING

Novelist and Man of Letters (1857-1903)

These pages celebrate Gissing's achievement and publish material on his life and works...

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, a diary and enough surviving 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 (often 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.

Of his non-fiction, his account of a visit to the impoverished south of Italy, By the Ionian Sea, has its 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

Websites

Gissing in Cyberspace maintained by Mitsuharu Matsuoka is an enormously comprehensive site on all matters to do with Gissing, and it is regularly updated.

The Works

Nearly all of Gissing's texts are available on the site above.

Biography

• A sketch of Gissing's often tormented life

• The Private Life of Henry Maitland, by Morley Roberts: an E-text of the first biography

• "George Gissing" in Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion (OUP, 1997): Be Warned!

• Gissing and Jack the Ripper: was Gissing questioned?

Criticism and Appreciation

• A critical survey of Gissing's achievement, with many illustrative extracts.

• The state of Gissing studies since 1961 (edition of texts, biography, book-length criticism): an essay by Prof. John Halperin, which has been partially brought up to date.

• Gissing's London streetscapes: examples still existing, as described in Thyrza and New Grub Street.

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

My review of the 1998 Broadview edition with introduction, notes and secondary reading by Arlene Young.

The Letters

My 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. See the Sidebar for my review-essay on the subject; see there also for Orwell's two essays (1943, 1948) on Gissing.

Research and other Gissing items

• Gissing in Prison - Paul Delany recovers the Manchester records. Posted here by permission.

• The Gissing Newsletter and Gissing Journal (back to 1965, up to 1990) is available on the Gissing in Cyberspace website, here.

• Books, articles and theses on Gissing: the long-established Victorian Studies database is free to use. It lists about 250 items at present.

• U and Irish theses on Gissing, 1970-1996. About 25 are listed. You or your institution needs a subscription to consult this database.

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: April 2021