Product Description

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. With vivid realism 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, as universal education, popular journalism, and mass communication began to leave their mark on the life of intellectuals. Projecting a strong sense of the London in which his characters struggle, Gissing also illuminates `the valley of the shadow of books', where the spirit of alienation that created modernism was already stirring.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3712163 in Books
• Published on: 1985-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 425 pages

Customer Reviews

A unsurpassed commentary on the Victorian literary scene
If the writer's life or the literary life or the everyday life of late Victorian England is your thing then New Grub Street is the book for you. It is a timeless classic, which has become a cult read for many beloved of Gissing. Full of characters who live and who you will come to love. Biffen and Reardon, they live on in the memory, loveable and hopeless, incorrigible, and yet faithful to their broken dreams and ideals. And despite its pessimism, this is a book full of optimism and the humanity that enriches one's life. I can only say that this is a book to be read countless times, for more than any writer I've read, Gissing has so much to give and this goes for all of his books. Read this and then go on to the others and you will know what I mean. George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, DH Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and many other of our writers read him and admired him. Some other books by Gissing: Born in Exile, Demos, The Odd Women, In the Year of Jubilee, The Whirlpool, The Nether World, etc.,

Compelling, if not uplifting...
This is an engaging, if ultimately rather pessimistic novel: the bleak irony which underpins New Grub Street is that those men who have sought to escape the mundane necessity of remunerative employment find themselves, through committing themselves to a career as a man of letters, in thrall to the harsh economic realities of professional writing in late Victorian England. These realities have never been described with a more harrowing authenticity than in New Grub Street - Gissing is writing from a series of personal experiences which left him tottering on the point of penury and starvation. His characterisation is memorable and his prose is lucid and engaging. Gissing will almost certainly never be considered amongst the elite of Victorian England's authors - he lacks Dickens' vitality, for instance, or Hardy's understanding of human potential - but New Grub Street is undoubtedly a significant and thought-provoking novel.

A high point in nineteenth century literature
George Gissing produced this vision of a self-enclosed social order in as compelling a style as Eliot's Middlemarch. However, where Middlemarch focused on one town, Gissing takes as his object one economic sector - professional writing in the 1880s - and shows up its modus operandi, portrays its types, reveals to us the inner dynamics of profit and power driving the system, its various feuds along with the changing fortunes of the women and men who sought to earn a living by the pen. More than social history, its character studies live and breathe: Gissing imbibes his young married couples, patriarchs and struggling misits with a tragic power equal to their counterparts in George Eliot's work. Yes, there is excess dialogue, a flaw generally noted in Gissing, mostly in the final fifty or so pages. However this should be overlooked in finally judging the book because, to get down to brass tacks, we're dealing with a word used far too often but by no means out of place here: *masterpiece*.