George Gissing
22 November 1857 - 28 December 1903
Gissing wrote a number of novels that were moderately successful in his day, but that are receiving critical attention currently for their unusual perspective on class and gender relations. His most famous novels are New Grub Street, The Whirlpool, The Odd Women, and In the Year of the Jubilee. His novels are about characters in precarious places. They are trying to navigate their relations with others, but in a time when the old (Victorian) guidelines for social interactions, especially between genders and classes, are ceasing to operate - consequently, they have to improvise, often with disastrous consequences.
Gissing was born in Yorkshire
to a poor middle-class family, but was an excellent student
with bright prospects. He had been accepted at London University with a
scholarship when
he was caught stealing money for a prostitute named Nell Harrison with
whom he was enamored. After spending some time in prison,
Gissing emigrated to America, burdened for the rest of his life with the secret
of his crime; a secret which he felt exiled him from respectable society
forever. He met with no financial success in America,
and returned to England, where he began writing and tutoring for a living.
During his time abroad, he and Nell Harrison
corresponded, and they married upon his return. The marriage ended badly
(in fact, it ended in Nell being dead) at least in part because she was an
alcoholic and sometimes returned to her old line of work. She seems to
have died of a combination of alcoholism and an unspecified STD.
During this phase of his
life, Gissing mostly wrote gritty naturalistic novels of the English poor.
These did not sell terribly well, although (because?) they are filled with
details drawn from life.
After
the death of Nell, Gissing lived by himself for six years, very lonely but
unable or unwilling to thrust himself upon middle class society.
He deliberately exiled himself from the
literary world, and when he once again married out of caste -a working class
woman named Eliza Underwood - he seems to have
attempted a Henry Higgins-Eliza Doolittle
relationship, improving her grammar and
correcting her spelling. Eliza (perhaps not surprisingly) proved to
be mentally unstable. The couple had two sons before they irrevocably
parted, Eliza to end in an asylum.
Gissing's last union was with French translator Gabrielle Fleury. They moved together to France, but Gissing was terribly homesick. He died in France of emphysema.
For more information, visit the The George Gissing Website
Many of Gissing's works have been transcribed for the Internet by Mitsuharu Matsuoka. The texts below are hosted by Gissing in Hyperspace, which also contains a picture gallery, the Gissing Journal, and other links and information.
George Orwell wrote an essay on Gissing in 1948.
