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George Gissing: A Life

The downfall of a pessimist

Paul Delaney
Weidenfeld, 472pp, £25,

Ferdinand Mount

Wednesday, 5th March 2008

Ferdinand Mount reviews Paul Delany's biography of George Gessing

In some moods, I would rather read George Gissing than any other 19th-century English novelist. In the 1890s he was ranked with Hardy and Meredith, at a time when they had finished writing novels and he was only just getting into his tortured stride. Orwell called The Odd Women ‘one of the best novels in English’. But somehow Gissing has fallen off the shelves, not out of print but of public regard, fatally obscured by a reputation for gloom and pessimism. Gissing — the very word is like a South London street on a wet Monday. He himself rather revelled in that reputation. When he discovered that the next tenant in his old lodgings in Brixton had killed himself, he noted in his diary: ‘The atmosphere I left behind me, some would say, killed the poor man.’

Yet reading any of his best novels — New Grub Street, Born in Exile, In the Year of Jubilee — is in fact an exhilarating experience, like splashing through icy puddles with the rain in your face. They move at a breakneck pace, partly because he wrote them at unbelievable speed, making other famously facile writers like Trollope and Simenon look positively constipated. He finished The Odd Women — 336 pages in the Virago edition — in 50 days. His mind was always bubbling with new plot-lines, which generated any number of false starts. In the year after finishing Born in Exile, he began and then abandoned at least nine other novels. It comes as a shock, though it shouldn’t, that someone who wrote so much about defeated people — struggling writers, devitalised shop assistants, unloved spinsters — could himself master anything he tried his hand at. The son of a Suffolk pharmacist with literary tastes who migrated north to Wakefield, George Gissing passed out top in the whole country in English and Latin when he sat his London BA at Owens College, Manchester, a feat never achieved before. He also taught himself Greek, French, German, Italian and Spanish. He chucked out Christianity, read Darwin, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, walked 50 miles in a day, was a competent illustrator and knew more about flora and fauna than Thomas Hardy. He was a handsome man too, with a great mane of swept-back hair, grey-blue eyes and a profile as fine as Rupert Brooke’s. For all his grouchiness, he didn’t have an enemy in the world — until he got married. E. W. Hornung met him in Rome towards the end of his life and said:

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jeffrey manley

March 6th, 2008 6:48pm

When mentioning prominent South London authors, I'm surprised Mr. Mount does not name Henry Williamson. The fisrt volumes of his Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight describe his early life in and around Lewisham. And Mr. Mount is surely familiar with his work since he calls his own series of novels Chronicle of Modern Twilight. These latter by the way should have received more attention than they have.

Markus Neacey

March 11th, 2008 10:13pm

Gissing was not the self-defeating, self-pitying, or hopelessly pessimistic individual so many generally misinformed reviewers imagine him to be. Had he been so he would have hanged himself in his prison cell. Yet, having sacrificed his career and reputation to save a common prostitute, he did not wallow in despair. Instead, by sheer determination and imcomparable industriousness, not to mention courage, he resurrected his life and made of it beauty from ashes. For, during twenty-five years of literary activity, he produced a body of work, whose power and humanity resounds to this day. As Orwell in his day and his many admirers today recognise, that is hardly the legacy of a defeated pessimist.