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: #22385 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 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.

Inspired and incredibly relevant
In `New Grub Street' George Gissing delves into the nature of the literary world of late Nineteenth Century London. His portrayal is stark and certainly in some ways pessimistic. Don't think, though, this subject matter too obscure. If anything, Gissing's observations are even more true today.

Gissing's skill at depicting the subtleties and contradictions of character, both male and female is unmatched, even in the modern age. `New Grub Street' moves you because you believe in the characters that he creates, and what's more, you can't help liking them. Even Jasper Milvain, who seems so hateful in the first chapter becomes rounded, full, even likeable at times.

The imagery that Gissing weaves into his text is gentle and apposite but never intrusive. The book is full of memorable scenes and conversations. You'll never read a more skilful piece of writing than the fire scene in any book, by any author.

This is the third of Gissing's novels that I have read (The Odd Women and The Emancipated were the others), and I have loved all three. For me, Gissing is the most under-read and under-rated of British novelists. 'New Grub Street', however, is the best of the three. It has all of Gissing's trademark qualities - intellectual dialogue, subtly developed characters with mixed motives - but is also masterfully structured with memorable scenes.

It's brilliant.