Bøker av George Gissing

'Marriage rarely means happiness, either for man or woman; if it be not too grievous to be borne, one must thank the fates and take courage'.The greatest of English realist novelists, famous for New Grub Street, George Gissing creates in The Whirlpool an astonish picture of characters caught in the vortex of London, struggling to understand how they can make sense of their lives in a society of remorseless faithlessness and social snobbery.A whole era is magnificently brought to life in all its glamour and squalor - and at the book's heart lies one of the most remarkable figures in English literature: Alma Rolfe, torn between an idyll of rural domesticity and her career in London as a musician.

This text dramatises many key issues relating to class and gender in late Victorian culture. In Gissing's story, Virginia Madden and her two sisters are confronted upon the death of their father with sudden impoverishment.

No novel in the English tradition even remotely approximates the thoroughness, sophistication, and clear-sightedness with which New Grub Street explores the social and economic contexts in which writing, publishing, and reading take place.

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. 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.

Set in grimy, fog-ridden London, Gissing's `odd' women range from the idealistic 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. 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.

The Nether World (1889) is generally regarded as the finest of Gissing's early novels. A fast moving story of highly dramatic, sometimes violent scenes, it depicts life amongst the artisans, factory-girls, and slum-dwellers of Clerkenwell in the 1870s. But this is not just a novel of documentary realism. It is one man's mordant vision - shaped by bitter personal experience of poverty - of the quality of life endured by a variety of characters in the netherworld. With Zolaesque intensity and relentlessness, Gissing lays bare the economic forces which determine the aspirations and expectations of those born to a life of labour.This is a tale of intrigue, as rapacious schemers try to wrest a fortune out of a mysterious old man who has returned to their midst, and of thwarted love. There is no sentimentality. This is a world in which the strong exercise power against their own kind, scheming and struggling for survival, a world from which, Gissing bleakly maintains, there can be no escape.

Hailed as Gissing's finest novel, New Grub Street portrays the intrigues and hardships of the publishing world in late Victorian England. In a materialistic, class-conscious society that rewards commercial savvy over artistic achievement, authors and scholars struggle to earn a living without compromising their standards. "Even as the novel chills us with its still-recognizable portrayal of the crass and vulgar world of literary endeavor,” writes Francine Prose in her Introduction, "its very existence provides eloquent, encouraging proof of the fact that a powerful, honest writer can transcend the constraints of commerce.” This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the text of the 1891 first edition.

"[Gissing] achieved one of the very few novels in English that can be compared with those of the French naturalists who were his contemporaries." -Walter Allen, The English Novel

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.