George Orwell was asked to write a biography of George Gissing, having hailed him as "perhaps the best novelist England has produced." He had to refuse, and instead of a book like this one, Orwell wrote a novel, "1984." His closeness to Gissing can help draw the map of English literature from 1880 to 1950. Orwell was born in the year that Gissing died, 1903. Both of them lived 46 years and died of lung disease. It is likely that Orwell borrowed the first name of his pseudonym from Gissing. Orwell, though, chose to live ...
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George Orwell was asked to write a biography of George Gissing, having hailed him as "perhaps the best novelist England has produced." He had to refuse, and instead of a book like this one, Orwell wrote a novel, "1984." His closeness to Gissing can help draw the map of English literature from 1880 to 1950. Orwell was born in the year that Gissing died, 1903. Both of them lived 46 years and died of lung disease. It is likely that Orwell borrowed the first name of his pseudonym from Gissing. Orwell, though, chose to live among the poor to begin a lifelong commitment to leftist politics. Gissing became poor by bad luck and bad judgement; he came to believe that political solutions were unlikely to abolish human misery, and declared that the great subject of his novels was the situation of educated people with "not enough money." Paul Delany has read Gissing's 22 novels, and his other works, with a fine biographer's eye. Gissing was a neurotic writer, and everything in his later life was determined by the twin disasters of his imprisonment and his marriage to Nell Harrison. Prison he concealed altogether. It could be argued that Victorian society rested on hypocrisy, requiring everyone to lie about their desires. But the major figures in Gissing's novels are almost always bad liars. In his own case a mistake in youth created daily misery that he could never shake off. Yet Gissing the novelist gives us better than anyone the flavor of London in the 1880s and 1890s: a compound of wet streets, fog, coal-smoke, narrow horizons, and an imagination equal to it all. In Paul Delany he has found the perfect biographer.
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Most readers find over time authors that speak directly and intimately to them. For me, one such writer is George Gissing (1857 ? 1903), whom I have read for most of my adult life. Gissing has always been an author more admired than read, and for many years most of his books were difficult to find. Fortunately, with the advent of digitalization that situation has changed. Gissing continues to attract a good deal of critical attention, both for his works and for his life. Among recent works on Gissing this new biography ?George Gissing: A Life? by Paul Delany should become the standard account of Gissing?s life due to its sympathetic understanding of its subject and to its erudition. Delany taught at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, for many years. He has written about D.H. Lawrence, Rupert Brooke, and the photographer Bill Brandt.
As do most students of Gissing, Delany finds his novels and stories largely autobiographical in character. Thus, Delany makes great use of them in describing the life. His biography also draws heavily upon Gissing?s letters and diary and other primary biographical sources. Gissing?s difficult, tortured and overworked brief life emerge in this study, with Delany showing effectively how many of the author?s problems were of his own making. Delany gives a great deal of attention to Gissing?s relationship with his family, his mother, his brother Algernon, and his two unmarried sisters, Ellen and Margaret. Throughout his adult life, Gissing?s difficult financial situation was exacerbated by the responsibility he felt to support his family. But the focus of Delany?s book is on Gissing?s mistakes as a young man and on his lifelong difficulty with women and sexuality. Thus the book is organized around Gissing?s three failed relationships with the important women in his life which, for the benefit of those readers unfamiliar with Gissing, I will touch upon below.
Born in Wakefield, Gissing was a prize student at Owens College when he became romantically involved with Nell Harrison, a young prostitute. Gissing was caught stealing for Nell, expelled from college, and sentenced to a month in jail at hard labor where he almost starved. After a year in the United States which included additional romantic difficulties, Gissing returned to London and attempted to make his way as a novelist. He had a stormy, unhappy marriage with Nell whom he continued to support until her death in 1888. Delany suggests that Gissing contracted syphilis from Nell which ultimately killed him. Unhappy as the relationship with Nell was, it became the source of Gissing?s early novels of low London life, including ?The Nether World?, ?Demos?, and ?Thyzra.?
Gissing repeated his mistake when he impulsively married another working woman, Edith Underwood, who may also have been a prostitute, following Nell?s death. The couple fought bitterly until they separated in 1897. During his time with Edith, Gissing wrote his best-remembered works, including ?New Grub Street? and ?The Odd Women.?
For the last part of his life, Gissing lived with a French woman, Gabrielle Fleury, whom he had met through her translation of ?New Grub Street?. This relationship proved more successful than the earlier marriages, but it was plagued by Gissing?s dislike of living in France, by ill health, and by the dominating, intrusive presence of Garbrielle?s mother.
Delany offers a convincing portrait of a neurotically troubled individual and a great writer and novelist of ideas. Although his book is not a critical study, Delany describes each of Gissing?s 22 novels, his travel book ?By the Ionian Sea?, his voluminous short stories and other writings in some detail. He discusses Gissing?s relationships with his publishers who frequently took advantage of him, thus keeping him in poverty. He gives the reader a picture of a lonely life, bound by the subject?s own mistakes and sensitivities and by the sexual mores of Victorian England. I felt the garrets, shabby streets and poverty that cry out from Gissing?s own writings. Delany offers a philosophical understanding of Gissing?s pessimism and of the influence of Darwin and Herbert Spencer on his thought. Delany also shows how difficult the process of writing was for Gissing. Although he wrote quickly and prolifically, he had long periods of dry spells. He also was a severe critic of his own work, abandoning many novels including some that were completed or on the verge of completion. I felt a sense of loss in not having some of these books.
As with most good biographies, Delany?s begins with a thoughtful Introduction summarizing the view of Gissing he develops, and it concludes with an Afterword offering comments on the nature of Gissing?s achievement. Here are some of Delany?s thoughts from the Afterword that I found noteworthy.
?Where other novelists take it as given that individuals seek their own fates, Gissing shows that, most of the time, their fates are made for them.?
?This tension between personal will and the force of circumstances has informed my biography of Gissing.... What seemed to be the greatest misfortunes of his life ? his two disastrous marriages ? were also what made him an exceptional man, and an artist.?
?That was Gissing?s calling as a writer: to walk the streets, to see and hear the people, to record it all in sorrow and in pity.?
I learned a great deal from this book about Gissing, and I will return to it often as I continue to read him. But another important point of Delany?s Afterword is that ?reading Gissing is not a comfortable experience?. For readers wanting to know something of this too-little appreciated author, Delany?s book is a good place to start.
