George Gissing

Written in 1888, 'The Nether World' is a novel that depicts life amongst the poor in the Clerkenwell of the 1870s. Gissing's exposure of London's squalor and poverty is characterised by Zolaesque intensity and relentlessness.

The Nether World

With the growth of his militant egoism, there had developed in Godwin Peak an excess of nervous sensibility which threatened to deprive his character of the initiative rightly belonging to it. Self-assertion is the practical complement of self-esteem. To be largely endowed with the latter quality, yet constrained by a coward delicacy to repress it, is to suffer martyrdom at the pleasure of every robust assailant, and in the end be driven to the refuge of a moody solitude.

Born in Exile

A classic work of travel literature relates the author's 1897 journey to Calabria and the wild Italian coast south of Naples

Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy

By the Ionian Sea

New Grub Street (1891), generally regarded as Gissing's finest novel, is the story of the daily lives and broken dreams of men and women forced to earn a living by the pen. With vivid realism it tells of a group of novelists, journalists, and scholars caught in the literary and cultural crisis that hit Britain in the closing years of the nineteenth century, as universal education, popular journalism, and mass communication began to leave their mark on the life of intellectuals. Projecting a strong sense of the London in which his characters struggle, Gissing also illuminates `the valley of the shadow of books', where the spirit of alienation that created modernism was already stirring.

New Grub Street

"The impoverished Madden sisters are ill-equipped to support themselves when their father dies, and Monica sees her only chance of escape from a life of grinding misery in marriage. When she is befriended by two independent women, who strive to educate single women to take control of their destinies, the choices that lie ahead for all of them are starkly defined."--Publisher description.

The Odd Women

`there are half a million more women than men in this unhappy country of ours . . . So many odd women - no making a pair with them.' The idea of the superfluity of unmarried women was one the `New Woman' novels of the 1890s sought to challenge. But in The Odd Women (1893) Gissing satirizes the prevailing literary image of the `New Woman' and makes the point that unmarried women were generally viewed less as noble and romantic figures than as `odd' and marginal in relation to the ideal of womanhood itself. Set in grimy, fog-ridden London, these `odd' women range from the idealistic, financially self-sufficient Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn, who run a school to train young women in office skills for work, to the Madden sisters struggling to subsist in low-paid jobs and experiencing little comfort or pleasure in their lives. Yet it is for the youngest Madden sister's marriage that the novel reserves its most sinister critique. With superb detachment Gissing captures contemporary society's ambivalence towards its own period of transition. The Odd Women is a novel engaged with all the major sexual and social issues of the late-nineteenth century. Judged by contemporary reviewers as equal to Zola and Ibsen, Gissing was seen to have produced an `intensely modern' work and it is perhaps for this reason that the issues it raises remain the subject of contemporary debate. *Introduction *Textual Note *Bibliography *Chronology *Explanatory Notes *Map ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Crown of Life

Denzil Quarrier is a story by George Gissing. Gissing was an English novelist, who put out 23 novels between during the late 19th century. Excerpt: "In a room in the west of London—a room full of pictures and bric-a-brac, of quaint and luxurious furniture, with volumes abundant, with a piano in a shadowed corner, a violin and a mandoline laid carelessly aside—two men sat facing each other, their looks expressive of anything but mutual confidence. The one (he wore an overcoat, and had muddy boots) was past middle age, bald, round-shouldered, dressed like a country gentleman; upon his knees lay a small hand-bag, which he seemed about to open."

Denzil Quarrier

Over the course of his literary careeer, George Gissing emerged as a chronicler of Britain's emerging middle class. In novels such as New Grub Street, he took it upon himself to outline the challenges facing this new demographic niche, which he described as "well educated, fairly bred, but without money." The Paying Guest explores same of the same themes -- class tensions, intrigue, and the grit beneath the glittering surface of the Victorian era.

The Paying Guest

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

in large print

Despite the fact that all his novels deal with social issues of the day, notably women, money, and class relations, George Gissing was neither a socialist nor a social reformer. He simply described in novels what he knew of degradation, misery, and the tortures "respectable" English society inflicted upon its outcasts and marginal figures. In The Odd Women Gissing chose to focus on the predicament of the extra females of Britain's disproportionate population ratio. These were the "odd" women who would never be matched with a man. Gissing's Madden sisters endured a representative sampling of the a dreary employment opportunities available for genteel but impoverished women in the 1890s. Of the two eldest Madden sisters, Alice was a governess until her health broke down; Virginia was lady's companion (poorly-paid drudge to an elderly tyrant) who has suffered from "mental lassitude" and taken to secret drinking. Another sister, a luckless "hard-featured" girl, is dead before the story begins; she taught in a girl's school until she committed suicide in despair. Monica, the youngest and only good-looking sister, spends twelve to sixteen hours a day on her feet in a large dry-goods shop and lives in an unsanitary dormitory with other shopgirls, some of whom supplement their wages by prostitution. Her sisters fear that Monica's health will also break down under this regime, and that she will lose her looks and her chance of marriage. Enter Miss Rhoda Nunn and Miss Elinor Barfoot, two enterprising women who have founded a school to teach "odd" women business skills to enable them to compete economically, or at least rise above the general level of ill-paid drudgery. Barfoot and Nunn are early feminists; they wish to live and teach other women to live without feeling diminished by their unmarried status. Monica Madden considers enrolling in their school, but she has managed to meet and attract a man, a middle-aged bachelor named Widdowson, whom she marries instead. The substance of the novel involves the wreck of Monica's life following her disastrous marriage, and Rhoda Nunn's struggle to deal with her relationship with a man she is attracted to, but whom she cannot marry or live with without suffering diminishment and the loss of her role as a teacher and leader. Gissing's book is a serious and sympathetic treatment of the much-discussed "woman question," and written from a point of view somewhat in advance of his time.

At eight o’clock on Sunday morning, Arthur Peachey unlocked his front door, and quietly went forth. He had not ventured to ask that early breakfast should be prepared for him. Enough that he was leaving home for a summer holiday—the first he had allowed himself since his marriage three years ago. It was a house in De Crespigny Park; unattached, double-fronted, with half-sunk basement, and a flight of steps to the stucco pillars at the entrance. De Crespigny Park, a thoroughfare connecting Grove Lane, Camberwell, with Denmark Hill, presents a double row of similar dwellings; its clean breadth, with foliage of trees and shrubs in front gardens, makes it pleasant to the eye that finds pleasure in suburban London. In point of respectability, it has claims only to be appreciated by the ambitious middle-class of Camberwell. Each house seems to remind its neighbour, with all the complacence expressible in buff brick, that in this locality lodgings are not to let. For an hour after Peachey’s departure, the silence of the house was unbroken. Then a bedroom door opened, and a lady in a morning gown of the fashionable heliotrope came downstairs. She had acute features; eyes which seemed to indicate the concentration of her thoughts upon a difficult problem, and cheeks of singular bloom. Her name was Beatrice French; her years numbered six and twenty. She entered the dining-room and drew up the blind. Though the furniture was less than a year old, and by no means of the cheapest description, slovenly housekeeping had dulled the brightness of every surface. On a chair lay a broken toy, one of those elaborate and costly playthings which serve no purpose but to stunt a child’s imagination. Though the time was midsummer, not a flower appeared among the pretentious ornaments. The pictures were a strange medley—autotypes of some artistic value hanging side by side with hideous oleographs framed in ponderous gilding. Miss. ——— then violently rang the bell. When the summons had been twice French looked about her with an expression of strong disgust, repeated, there appeared a young woman whose features told of long and placid slumbers.

In the Year of Jubilee

A Novel

Workers in the Dawn

Demos: A Story of English Socialism is a novel by the English author George Gissing.It was written between late 1885 and March 1886 and first published in April 1886 by Smith, Elder & Co.

Demos Annotated

Eve's Ranson - A novel is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1895. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.

Eve's Ranson

Eve's Ransom

'If only I had the skill, I would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies' In New Grub Street George Gissing re-created a microcosm of London's literary society as he had experienced it. His novel is at once a major social document and a story that draws us irresistibly into the twilit world of Edwin Reardon, a struggling novelist, and his friends and acquaintances in Grub Street including Jasper Milvain, an ambitious journalist, and Alfred Yule, an embittered critic. Here Gissing brings to life the bitter battles (fought out in obscure garrets or in the Reading Room of the British Museum) between integrity and the dictates of the market place, the miseries of genteel poverty and the damage that failure and hardship do to human personality and relationships. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

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