We see Gissing at his most unpleasant when he refuses to allow Edith to answer letters from a middle-class friend, claiming that ‘she has long since given up hope of learning to write, so I will answer for her’ — when in fact perfectly coherent letters from Edith survive to this day. He was almost as horrible to their two sons. Walter, the elder, was ‘deplorably ugly’, as well as being ‘ill-tempered, untruthful, precociously insolent, surprisingly selfish’. He never saw the boys or Edith for the last five years of his life, which he spent at Pau with Gabrielle Fleury, a French literary groupie who acted as his third wife, though Edith was still alive. They settled in the Pyrenees in the mistaken belief that the climate was good for his lungs. In fact what he was dying of was syphilis, probably contracted from Nell all those years ago in Water Street. In the Pyrenees he yearned for the lanes round Guildford.

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