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.
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.
1. Workers in the Dawn
2. The Unclassed
3. Isabel Clarendon
4. Demos
5. Thyrza
6. A Life's Morning
7. The Nether World
8. The Emancipated
9. New Grub Street
10. Denzil Quarrier
11. Born in Exile
12. The Odd Women
13. In the Year of Jubilee
14. Eve's Ransom
* Human Odds and Ends
1. "Comrades in Arms"
2. "The Justice and the Vagabond"
3. "The Firebrand"
4. "An Inspiration"
5. "The Poet's Portmanteau"
6. "The Day of Silence"
7. "In Honour Bound"
8. "The Prize Lodger"
9. "Our Mr. Jupp"
10. "The Medicine Man"
NOTE: The following are NOT in proper MLA format - please do not use them as models!
The smiling muse : Victoriana in the comic press. / Savory, Jerold / Philadelphia / 1985 NX 650 P37 S28 1985 PCL
Victorian style. /
Miller, Judith / London / 1997(1993)
NK 2115.5 V53 M55 1997 Architecture Library
VICTORIANA,
A COLLECTOR'S GUIDE / WOOD, VIOLET (MACKWORTH-PRAED). / 1961
708.051 W85V PCL Stacks
Victoriana.
/ Laver, James, 1899- / London / 1966 HRC
AC-L L388VI 1966A Humanities Research Center USE IN LIBRARY ONLY
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This page was last updated Saturday, 18-May-2002 08:28:12 CDT