George Gissing

New Grub Street

Janice Hopper

Well...

Victorian England, amirite???? Jeezopete. 

Writers starving; writer with ambition spurning the first woman he loved so he could marry for money; earnest writer finishes his book, but then sees no future and commits suicide.

I think if I met Jasper Malvain, I'd punch him right in the mouth. What a fucking asshole. And he gets the happy ending???

Jeezopete.

Frustrating to read, but well done. Yay Victorian book club!

Seth Kalback

Clare B

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.

Jenny Smoothy

Abby N. Lewis

Joshua Line

Reprint. Originally published: Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1968. (Penguin English library)

New Grub Street

Reviews