In 1872, after an exceptional performance in the Oxford Local Examinations, Gissing won a scholarship to Owens College, forerunner of the University of Manchester.
In 1872, after an exceptional performance in the Oxford Local Examinations, Gissing won a scholarship to Owens College, forerunner of the University of Manchester.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004TSB0WG/?tag=2022091-20
1886
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0082YUVH8/?tag=2022091-20
1889
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198729189/?tag=2022091-20
1891
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0082VJUHI/?tag=2022091-20
1892
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1514870282/?tag=2022091-20
1893
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1985409623/?tag=2022091-20
1895
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0082YVE4C/?tag=2022091-20
1897
(The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is a semi-fictional ...)
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is a semi-fictional autobiographical work by George Gissing in which the author casts himself as the editor of the diary of a deceased acquaintance, selecting essays for posthumous publication.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1986931536/?tag=2022091-20
1903
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AQQDPWS/?tag=2022091-20
George Gissing was born on November 22, 1857 in Wakefield, United Kingdom, into the family of Thomas Waller and Margaret (Bedford) Gissing. As a boy, Gissing was studious and serious, reading copiously and somewhat disdainful of childish pursuits. When Thomas Gissing died of a lung ailment in 1870, George Gissing was devastated.
Gissing was educated at Back Lane School in Wakefield, where he was a diligent and enthusiastic student. In 1872, after an exceptional performance in the Oxford Local Examinations, Gissing won a scholarship to Owens College, forerunner of the University of Manchester.
The root of Gissing’s problem with the law was Marianne Helen Harrison, a seventeen-year-old Manchester girl without money or family who did odd jobs and frequented pubs in the vicinity of the college. She had a drinking problem, few prospects, and, in order to support herself, resorted occasionally to prostitution. Gissing had fallen in love with her, and entertained the idea of “reforming” and “rescuing” her.
Having no money of his own with which to perform this rescue, he began stealing books, clothing, and money from the common room at the college. In response to the thefts, the college planted marked currency in the common, and Gissing was later caught with it on his person. He served a month’s imprisonment at hard labor. The doors of academia closed behind him, permanently. After his release from prison, Gissing’s family urged him to try his luck in the United States, secretly hoping that time away from England would help him to forget Harrison.
Gissing arrived in Boston in the autumn of 1876, and it was here, in straitened circumstances, that he first began writing for publication. His first sale was an article about an art exhibit, that appeared in a local periodical. After only a month in Boston, Gissing moved to Waltham, Massachusetts, to teach languages at the high school there. In March 1877, he abruptly relocated to Chicago, where his career as a writer of fiction began. With no prospects and no resources, he penned as many stories as he could and sold them to the Chicago newspapers. The first of these was “The Sins of the Fathers”, a thinly veiled fictionalization of his own history with “Nell” Harrison. This highly autobiographical tendency would be a hallmark of Gissing’s style.
After only four months, Gissing was in New York, first in New York City and later in the town of Troy, where a local newspaper had plagiarized one of his pieces. Gissing went to Troy not to protest his rights, but to ask for a job — and he was turned down. After three months straying through New England as the assistant to a traveling photographer, Gissing abandoned any dreams of making a life for himself in the United States, and returned to England in October, 1877. He was twenty years old.
By 1879 he had taken up residence in cheap lodgings in London’s slums, working primarily as a tutor, occasionally taking odd jobs when the opportunity arose. He was also at work on his first novel. The first manuscript was roundly rejected, as was the second, but Gissing's confidence in this second novel was such that he managed to finance its publication himself, using a little money left him by his father. This book was "Workers in the Dawn", which appeared in 1880. It didn’t sell, but its positivist philosophy, influenced by the French philosopher Auguste Comte, appealed to the head of the Positivist Society, Frederic Harrison, to whom Gissing had sent a complimentary copy. Through Frederic Harrison, Gissing began to make literary contacts, including lifelong friends and correspondents Eduard Bertz and Morely Roberts.
Gissing continued to write prolifically, although not to much success, until 1884, when his novel "The Unclassed" came to the attention of George Meredith, then a reader for the publishing company of Chapman & Hall. After Gissing implemented his suggestions, Meredith approved the work for publication. Unlike "Workers in the Dawn", "The Unclassed" was a more polished and concentrated novel, but Gissing continued to write thinly veiled autobiography — Osmond Waymark, the protagonist, is a failed novelist and impoverished intellectual living in the slums of London, the setting for all but one of Gissing’s twenty-two novels.
Gradually, Gissing came to criticize slum life as such less and less, tending instead to argue forcefully against what he perceived to be the universal threat of barbarism, which seemed poised to crush all intellectual and cultural values at every level of society. His subject was not the poor, but the poor intellectual, who could not find a place for himself and his values in the materialist world of industrial Europe.
"The Unclassed" to some extent represented a way out of this poverty for Gissing in that it brought him enough money to lease a flat in the vicinity of Regent’s Park in 1884. This would be his first residence apart from lodging houses since his youth in Yorkshire. In rapid succession he produced three more novels. "Demos", a bitter portrait of a working class organized in a democratic political movement with no higher motivation than greed and resentment, was both critically and publicly well-received for its sympathetic, if ultimately patrician, depiction of the woes of the poor, and its generally timely treatment of important social themes. "Demos" established Gissing more than any other early novel.
"Thyrza" is a melodrama about a doomed cross-class romance. The third novel is "Isabel Clarendon", which Pierre Coustillas said showed the influences of “Turgenev’s ‘country- house and garden atmosphere,’ Schopenhauer’s pessimism, Henry James’s technique, and occasional touches of Dickens-like characterization.” The next came "The Nether World", a novel of grinding despair and fatalism, tracing the futile efforts of various impoverished characters to escape the soul-killing circumstances in which they live, and the anguish of impotent but sympathetic outsiders.
After years of relentless writing, moving immediately from one project to the next, and battling the complex, gloomy emotions brought on by the death of Marianne, his love and ex-wife, Gissing decided to travel. He had spent most of his life yearning to visit the rest of Europe, and in September, 1888, he went first to Paris, and then on to Italy, to see first-hand the remains of the classical world whose literature he had devoured as a child. Naples charmed him and became one of his favorite haunts. He visited Florence, Venice, and Rome. This journey also marked a change of perspective for Gissing — he began to write about the problems of the middle classes, possibly taking his cue from Henry James, who felt that poor people were too busy struggling to survive to make interesting characters, at least for the purposes of contemplation.
James wrote about the rich, and in particular those who had become suddenly and unexpectedly rich, so as to scrutinize the inner conflicts that arise when a subject is suddenly freed and presented with the means to become whatever it wants. Gissing was moving in this direction as well, while coping with his own particular problem: how does the individual realize himself in a world dominated by faceless industry? The first novel of this sort, and the only one not to be set in London, was "The Emancipated", which appeared in 1890. Set in Italy, it records the diverse rebellions of a number of English travelers.
Having made arrangements for the publication of "The Emancipated" in England, Gissing returned to the Mediterranean, visiting Greece and then staying for some time in Naples, where he contracted the lung ailment that would shadow him for the rest of his life.
Back in England again, he began writing yet another novel, but, unusually for him, he found himself unable to work consistently. Distracted, desperate, writing in fits and starts, making bad beginnings, taking detours only to throw out manuscript repeatedly, he was especially hounded by loneliness. He set his mind on a second marriage. If the marriage itself was a ruin, it nevertheless gave Gissing the peace of mind he needed to complete his new novel, which would become his most famous and enduring work, "New Grub Street." The work is a parable of the destruction any sensitive spirit can expect to meet in the mercenary modern world.
While in Exeter, Gissing was once again able to work continuously, producing novel after novel, and, through them, beginning to exhibit a growing concern with women’s rights. He dealt with the issue directly in his 1893 novel, "The Odd Women", which was received as one of the best articulations of the problems surrounding the social emancipation of women on both sides.
Feeling a need for an urban environment again, Gissing moved his family back to London in 1893, and began setting himself up as a professional writer, joining societies, hiring William Morris Colles to be his literary agent, and taking up writing short stories again after a long hiatus. These stories saw print regularly, and provided a modest income. Gissing entered the established literary circles, and made friends with Thomas Hardy, Edward Clodd, and H.G. Wells. He continued to write, producing four novels in swift succession between 1894 and 1897, treating various lighter themes.
His first serious novel-length work of the time was "The Whirlpool", which appeared in 1897. It is a description of the sterility of upper-class self-indulgence, and it proved Gissing’s greatest commercial success. However, it was in February of that year that the troubles in Gissing’s marriage also came to a head, and he left his second wife, Edith. Despite attempts at a reconciliation, Gissing broke with Edith finally and took refuge, as he had before, in Italy. There, he wrote the first critical study of Dickens, an author he had long revered, and on whom he came to be regarded as an expert. In 1901 he published a collection of travel essays about his journeys on the eastern coast of Italy and the western coast of Greece. While visiting Rome, he encountered H.G. Wells again, and met Arthur Conan Doyle.
When Gissing returned to England, in April of 1898, he moved to Dorking where he lived alone, and resumed his writing. Two months later, he received a letter from Gabrielle Fleury, asking his permission for her proposed French translation of New Grub Street." This was the beginning of the most successful relationship Gissing ever had with a woman. In the spring of 1899 Gissing simply moved in with Fleury at her home in Paris, conducting an informal “marriage” service of their own on May 7 of that year.
Gissing remained as persnickety and difficult to live with as ever; he loathed French cooking, disliked Fleury’s flat, and continued to scrimp and save so as to send money to his family back in England. His mood was not lightened either by Edith’s obstinacy in refusing him a divorce or by his own, now chronic, ill health.
For all its imperfections, this period was the happiest Gissing ever knew. His one important literary work of the time was his collection of mature essays, "The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft", plainly an autobiography, but this time of a different sort. Gissing's tone had become more self-ironic, meditative, less strident and beleaguered. The book appeared in 1903 to tremendous success, the greatest of Gissing’s career, and he was almost wholly identified with it, to the exclusion of everything else.
This identification was advanced primarily because "The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft" proved to be Gissing’s swan song. He had been suffering from emphysema for years, and was reduced to semi-invalidism by 1901, requiring much rest and frequent recourse to sanatoria. He and Fleury moved to the south of France, hoping this might assist his recovery — but he continued to work himself too hard. In December of 1903, he contracted pneumonia and his condition worsened rapidly.
Wells came to see him, and, feeling that Fleury was not adequately attending him, attempted to interfere with her treatment, bringing in two nurses, and, against the doctor’s orders, supplying Gissing with more food than the light diet he had been prescribed. Fleury consequently blamed Wells’s bungling interference with at least hastening Gissing's death. Gissing’s old friend Morley Roberts also came to visit, but arrived one day too late. Gissing died on December 28. He was forty-six years old.
(The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is a semi-fictional ...)
1903An English clergyman, who had sat with Gissing, claimed in a written report that Gissing had converted to Christianity on his deathbed after a lifetime of skepticism. Fleury claimed that Gissing’s final delirious speeches had been misinterpreted, and Roberts vehemently supported her contestation of this “conversion.”
Gissing's conservatism was rooted in his aristocratic sensibility. After a brief flirtation with socialism in his youth, Gissing lost faith in the labour movements and scorned the popular enthusiasms of his day. Before 1890 his usual subjects were poverty, socialism, class differences, and attempts at social reform.
His work is serious — though not without a good deal of comic observation — interesting, scrupulously honest, and rather flat. It has a good deal of documentary interest for its detailed and accurate accounts of lower-middle-class London life. On the social position and psychology of women, he is particularly acute. Though he rejected Zola’s theory of naturalism, his ironic, agnostic, and pessimistic fictions came to be respected for their similarity to contemporary developments in French realist fiction.
Quotes from others about the person
One of the most original, daring and conscientious workers in fiction.
Gissing's academic career ended in disgrace when he fell in love with a young woman Marianne Helen Harrison, known as Nell. She is often described as a prostitute, but there is no evidence for this. It is reported that he gave her money in an attempt to keep her off the streets, but, again, there is no evidence. What is known, is that when he ran short of money he stole from his fellow students. As a result, he was jailed and, being freed later, sent to the United States by his parents, in order to forget Marianne. However, after returning to England, Gissing settled in London with Nell, writing fiction and working as a private tutor. Gissing married Nell on October 27, 1879. Their marriage was plagued with poverty and they were frequently separated while Nell was institutionalized for alcoholism.
On 25 February 1891, he married another working-class woman, Edith Alice Underwood. They had two children, Walter Leonard (1891–1916) and Alfred Charles Gissing (1896–1975), but the marriage was not successful. The couple separated in 1897, though this was not a clean break - Gissing spent his time dodging Edith and afraid she might seek a reconciliation. In 1902, Edith was certified insane and was confined to an asylum.
In July 1898, he met Gabrielle Marie Edith Fleury (1868–1954), a Frenchwoman who approached him with a request to translate New Grub Street. Ten months later, they became partners in a common-law marriage as Gissing did not divorce Edith.
George Meredith (12 February 1828 – 18 May 1909) was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times.
