George Gissing was the most gifted of those English novelists who chose to write in the naturalistic style pioneered by French writers like Zola and Maupassant, and his work shares with them a bitter condemnation of a social order in which poverty and despair are allowed to flourish unchecked. His most famous novel, however, is a painfully accurate portrait, as insightful today as it was in the 1890s, of the vicissitudes and indignities of the literary life. The two central characters of the novel stand at each end of the literary spectrum as Gissing envisages it. Edward Reardon, clearly a version of Gissing himself, is a fine writer but he is hampered by poverty and by marriage to a woman who cannot sympathize with his art. Jasper Milvain is a glib and facile reviewer with his eye firmly set on worldly success. As the novel unfolds, we watch Milvain’s inexorable rise and Reardon’s equally inevitable downfall. Gissing knew well the poverty and misery of late Victorian London which he evoked so brilliantly in his novels. A classical scholar whose academic career was ruined when he was imprisoned briefly as a young man for theft, he became a prolific novelist but it was only towards the end of his life that he began to earn enough to free him from haunting financial anxieties. Beginning with Workers in the Dawn (1880), Gissing wrote nearly twenty works of fiction in his relatively short career, books in which characters struggle against poverty, injustice and the constraints of traditional morality. The typical Gissing hero is a man like Reardon in New Grub Street, sensitive and intelligent but condemned to a life in which his gifts are little recognized. With a relish that is almost sadistic (or masochistic, if one considers how much he identified with his central characters), Gissing charts his heroes’ decline and eventual fall.

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