George
Gissing
born Nov. 22, 1857, Wakefield, Yorkshire, Eng.
died Dec. 28, 1903, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France
English novelist, noted for the unflinching realism of his novels about
the lower middle class.
Gissing was educated at Owens College, Manchester, where his academic
career was brilliant until he was expelled (and briefly imprisoned) for
theft. His personal life remained, until the last few years, mostly
unhappy. His two marriages—the first to a prostitute and the second to a
servant girl—brought him little but misery, and the life of near poverty
and constant drudgery—writing and teaching—that he led until the
mid-1880s is described in the novels New Grub Street (1891) and The
Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). In his last years Gissing
established a happy relationship with a Frenchwoman, Gabrielle Fleury,
with whom he lived.
Before he was 21 he conceived the ambition of writing a long series
of novels, somewhat in the manner of Balzac, whom he admired. The first
of these, Workers in the Dawn, appeared in 1880, to be followed by 21
others. Between 1886 and 1895 he published one or more novels every
year. He also wrote Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898), a
perceptive piece of literary criticism.
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: The Odd Women (1893) is a powerful
study of female frustration. He did not lack human sympathies, but his
obvious contempt for so many of his characters reflects an artistic
limitation. Gissing was deeply critical, in an almost wholly negative
way, of contemporary society. Of his novels, New Grub Street, considered
by some critics to be his only great book, is unique in its merciless
analysis of the compromises required by the literary life. 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.
