The Gissing Newsletter
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Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Journal
ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING JOURNAL “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ***************************** Volume XXXII, Number 2 April, 1996 ****************************** Contents A Distinguished Acquaintance of Gissing’s at Ciboure: Arthur Brownlow Fforde, by Pierre Coustillas 1 Between Emancipation and Restraint – Reading the Body in The Odd Women, by Mihoko Takeda 10 Shan F. Bullock: Gissing’s Admirer and an Ingenious Short Story Writer, by Masahiko Yahata 14 A Forgotten Assessment of Veranilda, by Randolph Faries, 2d 19 Gissing in the Boston Evening Transcript: His Interview by Joseph Anderson, by Pierre Coustillas 23 Book Review, by John Sloan 29 Notes and News 32 Recent Publications 34 Springtime in Northumberland, by Algernon Gissing 36 -- 1 -- A Distinguished Acquaintance of Gissing’s at Ciboure Arthur Brownlow Fforde Pierre Coustillas Until recently little enough was known of Gissing’s stay at Ciboure, the small fishing harbour adjoining Saint-Jean-de-Luz, from July 1902 to June 1903. He now kept his diary very irregularly and wrote down but few details about his social life. Correspondence with his relatives and friends was becoming infrequent; having to make a living by his pen, he concentrated on work as much as his health allowed. More numerous than those to any other correspondent at this time, his letters to his literary agent, James B. Pinker, are a faithful mirror of his professional activities, but of his non-literary occupations he said little to anyone. Rarely did he suggest that the trio he formed with Gabrielle Fleury and “Maman” enjoyed a pleasant and varied social life, that of the English colony. -
ISSN 0017-0615 the GISSING JOURNAL “More Than Most Men Am I Dependent on Sympathy to Bring out the Best That Is in Me.”
ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING JOURNAL “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume XXX, Number 2 April, 1994 ********************************** Contents London Homes and Haunts of George Gissing: An 1 Unpublished Essay by A. C. Gissing, edited by Pierre Coustillas and Xavier Pétremand The Critical Response to Gissing and Commentary about 15 him in the Chicago Evening Post (concluded), by Robert L. Selig Book Reviews, by Bouwe Postmus, Jacob Korg and Pierre Coustillas 22 Thesis Abstract, by Chandra Shekar Dubey 24 Notes and News 36 Recent Publications 39 -- 1 -- London Homes and Haunts of George Gissing An Unpublished Essay by A. C. Gissing Edited by Pierre Coustillas and Xavier Pétremand In our introduction to “George Gissing and War,” which was printed in the January 1992 number of this journal, we mentioned the existence of two other unpublished essays by Alfred Gissing, “Frederic Harrison and George Gissing” and “London Homes and Haunts of George Gissing.” The three of them were doubtless written in the 1930s when he lived with his sole surviving aunt Ellen at Croft Cottage. Alfred did not date these essays, but they all carry his address of the period – Barbon, Westmorland, via Carnforth. Although they were less ambitious pieces than the articles he published in the National Review in August 1929 and January 1937, they were doubtless intended for publication; yet there is no evidence available that their author tried to find them a home in magazines such as T.P.’s Weekly or John o’ London’s Weekly, which sought to offer cultural entertainment and information to a public that cared for literature and any easily digestible comment on writers’ lives and works. -
Place and Class in George Gissing' S "Slum" Novels, Part I, by Pat Colling 3
Contents Knowing Your Place: Place and Class in George Gissing' s "Slum" Novels, Part I, by Pat Colling 3 Gissing Reviewed on Amazon, by Robin Friedman 19 Notes and News 42 Recent Publications 43 ISSN 017-0615 The Gissing Journal Volume 50, Number 1,January 2014 "More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me." Commonplace Book Knowing Your Place: Place and Class in George Gissing's "Slum" Novels, Part 1 PAT COLLING The Gissing Trust Between 1880 and 1889 five of Gissing' s seven novels Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889)--were set in deprived neighbourhoods. All were concerned with life in penury, and had major characters who were working class. Contemporarynovelists and readers tended to see the poor as a cause; by the time Thyrza was published in 1887 George Gissing did not. By then he was not romanticising the working classes, nor presenting them as victims, nor necessarily as unhappy, and in this he can seem, to the reader expecting the established Victorian norm of philanthropic compassion, uncaring, even contemptuous. But his distinct representation of the poor-good, bad, and average-as they are, in the same way that novelists were already presenting the middle and upper classes, is respectfulrather than jaundiced. He sees them as individuals with differing characteristics, values, abilities, and aspirations, not as a lumpenproletariat in need of rescue and redemption. Gissing goes further than other novelists in 3 being willing to criticise the inhabitants as well as the slums, and he differs from them in his frequent presentation of the family as a scene of conflict rather than as the more familiar Victorian ideal of refuge. -
The Gissing Newsletter
THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume IX, Number 4 October, 1973 ********************************** -- 1 -- The Guilty Secret Gillian Tindall [This is an extract from chapter III of a book about Gissing to be published next spring by Maurice Temple Smith in London and probably by Harcourt Brace in America. The title, the author told me some months ago, is to be George Gissing, Writer. Gillian Tindall has made herself an enviable reputation among modern English novelists with a number of stories like The Youngest, Someone Else and Fly Away Home, the last of which was awarded the 1972 Somerset Maugham Award. She recently published a collection of short stories, Dances of Death (Hodder & Stoughton). There have been translations of her novels into Polish, Italian and French. – P.C.] *************************************************** Editorial Board Pierre Coustillas, Editor, University of Lille Shigeru Koike, Tokyo Metropolitan University Jacob Korg, University of Washington, Seattle Editorial correspondence should be sent to the editor: 10, rue Gay-Lussac, 59110-La Madeleine, France, and all other correspondence to: C. C. KOHLER, 141 High Street, Dorking, Surrey, England. Subscriptions Private Subscribers: £1.00 per annum Libraries: £1.50 per annum *************************************************** -- 2 -- Of the various personal themes which run like significant, persistent yet often irrelevant threads through Gissing’s novels and stories, that of the Guilty Secret is perhaps the most ubiquitous and at the same time the most elusive. You can read a number of his books before even spotting it as a theme, yet, once noticed, it makes its presence felt everywhere. -
Mitsuharu Matsuoka, Ed
Mitsuharu Matsuoka, ed., Society and Culture in the Late Victorian Age with Special Reference to Gissing: In the Year of the Sesquicentennial of His Birth, Hiroshima: Keisuisha, 2007. xiii+540 pp. In commemoration of the sesquicentennial of Gissing’s birth, a substan- tial study of the long-neglected novelist and his era was issued last year in Japan. The late Victorian age is analyzed from five angles—society, era, gender, author, and ideologies—Gissing constituting the core of the socio- cultural study. The book is no doubt a treasure trove of knowledge. The following are summaries of the 26 chapters, including the biographical introduction: Pierre Coustillas’s Introduction consists in a short biography of Gissing (trans. by Mitsuharu Matsuoka) whom he sees as a man of two worlds: the world of bitter destitution and frustration which he was forced to endure, and the world of classical literature in which his imagination sought a refuge. He then surveys Gissing’s life, incorporating biographical facts in chronological order. The reader is reminded that, in Japan, Gissing’s value was first recognized by the intelligentsia of the 1920s and the author con- cludes his account by observing that the genial, shy, and altruistic Gissing was a pacifist and humanistic intellectual who represented the conscience of his time. Part One: Society. In Chapter 1: “Education: Form and Substance,” Shigeru Koike first argues that the reform of the educational system in 19th- century England was intended to emphasize the importance of scientific methodologies, and then discusses Workers in the Dawn, Born in Exile, The Emancipated, and New Grub Street as images of Gissing’s view of educa- tion. -
George Gissing and the Place of Realism
George Gissing and the Place of Realism George Gissing and the Place of Realism Edited by Rebecca Hutcheon George Gissing and the Place of Realism Edited by Rebecca Hutcheon This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Hutcheon and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6998-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6998-0 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Rebecca Hutcheon Chapter 1 .................................................................................................. 14 George Gissing, Geographer? Richard Dennis Chapter 2 .................................................................................................. 36 Workers in the Dawn, Slum Writing and London’s “Urban Majority” Districts Jason Finch Chapter 3 .................................................................................................. 55 Four Lady Cyclists José Maria Diaz Lage Chapter 4 .................................................................................................. 70 Gissing’s Literary -
Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Newsletter
ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume XXVI, Number 2 April, 1990 ********************************** -- 1 -- CONTENTS Odd Women and Male Vision: Men’s Views of Women in The Odd Women, by Mark Gibson 2 Algernon Gissing Down under, by C. M. Wyatt and Pierre Coustillas 21 Ballade of Books Unbought, by Christopher Morley 34 A Japanese View of Victorian Heroines, by Pierre Coustillas 35 Notes and News 38 Recent Publications 41 *************************************************** Editorial Board Pierre Coustillas, Editor, University of Lille Shigeru Koike, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University Jacob Korg, University of Washington, Seattle Editorial correspondence should be sent to the Editor: 10, rue Gay-Lussac, 59110 La Madeleine, France, and all other correspondence to: C. C. KOHLER, 12, Horsham Road, Dorking, Surrey, RH4 2JL, England. Subscriptions Private Subscribers: £5.00 per annum Libraries: £8.00 per annum *************************************************** -- 2 -- Odd Women and Male Vision : Men’s Views of Women in The Odd Women Mark Gibson University of Sydney What a simple thing marriage had always seemed to him, and how far from simple he had found it! Why, it led him to musings which overset the order of the world, and flung all ideas of religion and morality into wildest confusion. George Gissing, The Odd Women, 1893.1 Mr. Widdowson’s disillusionment with married life and the bleak predicament in which this leaves him can be seen as framing the central concerns of George Gissing’s The Odd Women. Throughout the novel, Gissing focuses on what might be called the “death” of Victorian domestic ideology. -
Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Newsletter
ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume XIX, Number 3 July, 1983 ********************************** -- 1 -- Gissing out of Context : Denzil Quarrier Brian Robert Walker Wymondham College, Norfolk [This is the first of a series of articles reproduced from an unpublished M.A. thesis which Brian Walker summed up as follows on p. IV of his bound typescript: In this thesis I question the traditional focus of attention on Gissing’s work which seems to be primarily concerned with the social and historical aspects of his novels and with the personality of the author himself. ************************************************* Editorial Board Pierre Coustillas, Editor, University of Lille Shigeru Koike, Tokyo Metropolitan University Jacob Korg, University of Washington, Seattle Editorial Correspondence should be sent to the Editor: 10, rue Gay-Lussac, 59110-La Madeleine, France, and all other correspondence to C. C. KOHLER, 12, Horshani Road, Dorking, Surrey, RH4 2JL, England. Subscriptions: Private Subscribers: £3.00 per annum Libraries: £5.00 per annum ************************************************* -- 2 -- I attempt to consider the novels as works of art, as products of the imagination, as transfigurations and transmutations of reality, and to assess their value as expressing wider truths about the human condition. I examine Gissing’s treatment of character and his analysis of motivation and the springs of action and focus attention, particularly on his employment of irony as a reducing though positive technique. I conclude that each novel, whilst it is centred on a particular contemporary development or phenomenon, such as the cult of Aestheticism or the question of female emancipation, is concerned to stress that a complete allegiance to an ideology or social theory is damaging to full personal development. -
Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Newsletter
ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book ********************************** Volume XXV, Number 1 January, 1989 ********************************* -- 1 -- Gissing and Henry Ryecroft: Some Parallels and Affinities P. F. Kropholler Paris It has often been pointed out that Ryecroft represents certain aspects of Gissing at certain times. He is an idealized picture of what Gissing may have wished to be. Ryecroft is not harassed by financial and marital problems. He has a permanent home situated in a beautiful part of rural England. He has a discreet and efficient housekeeper. In all these respects his situation is very unlike Gissing’s own around 1900. However, even an idealized Gissing remains very much a Gissing. Ryecroft’s character, his views and experiences recall those of his creator. The situations and incidents described in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft are echoed in numerous passages ************************************************* Editorial Board Pierre Coustillas, Editor, University of Lille Shigeru Koike, Tokyo Metropolitan University Jacob Korg, University of Washington, Seattle Editorial correspondence should be sent to the Editor, 10, rue Gay-Lussac, 59110 La Madeleine, France, and all other correspondence to C. C. KOHLER, 12, Horsham Road, Dorking, Surrey, RH4 2JL, England. Subscriptions Private Subscribers: £5.00 per annum Libraries: £8.00 per annum ************************************************* -- 2 -- in the novels. We find some striking similarities but also some notable differences. The Ryecroft character, the scholarly recluse, the sad but resigned spectator of human life, is not confined to The Private Papers. In such an early novel as A Life’s Morning we might even speak of a married couple à la Ryecroft if this were not something of a contradictio in terminis. -
Some Private Papers of George Gissing
UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) An Exile's Cunning: Some Private Papers of George Gissing Postmus, B.P. Publication date 1999 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Postmus, B. P. (1999). An Exile's Cunning: Some Private Papers of George Gissing. Stichting Uitgeverij Noord-Holland. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:28 Sep 2021 Index American Notebook Achilles 63 Jenny Lind 45 Aeschylos 24 Boston Public Library 9,40 Aeschylus Boswell, James Choephoroe 24 The Life o/SamuelJohnson 42 Alboin Boucher, François 54 King of the Lombards 57 Brewer, E. Cobham Alliance, Chicago 26 Dictionary o/Phrase and Fable, A 40 AppIetons'Journal 13 Bridgwatet, Patrick 3 Aristarchus 64 British Museum 62 Arnold, Matthew Reading Room 16 "A Guide to English Literature," Brooke, Stopford A. -
The Gissing Journal
The Gissing Journal Volume XLIII, Number 4, October 2007 “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” Commonplace Book How Poor Was George Gissing? A Study of Gissing’s Income between 1877 and 1888 ROGER MILBRANDT Augustana Faculty, University of Alberta In 1891, shortly after it became apparent that his recently published New Grub Street was the most popular and esteemed novel he had hitherto published, Gissing made the following grim evaluation of his situation: Look at my position, with a novel succeeding as “New Grub Street” has done. I cannot buy books, I cannot subscribe to a library; I can only just afford the necessary food from day to day, and have to toil in fear of finishing my money before another book is ready. It is monstrously unjust. Who of the public would believe I am still in such poverty?1 Gissing was exaggerating; six days later he mentions the purchase of a library subscription to the Exeter Literary Society. Yet, the image of him- self evoked in this entry – that of the able and deserving author unfairly beset by degrading economic contingencies – has persisted, available for employment both as a biographical fact and a defining literary theme. Writing in 1908, Paul Elmer More found the “greater Gissing” in “the Epic of Poverty” distilled from Gissing’s own experience of impoverishment in London.2 By 1912, Virginia Woolf asserted that Gissing “wrote his best only when he was describing struggles and miseries and noble suffering” and that what the body of his work proves is “the terrible importance of money.”3 In the same year, Frank Swinnerton noted that Gissing “has been thought of as one perpetually in want, a figure of tragic frustration.”4 Swinnerton proceeds, however, to claim that this image of Gissing had been “falsely created.” Nor was he the first to voice this suspicion. -
Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Journal
ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING JOURNAL “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume XXX, Number 4 October, 1994 ********************************** Contents The Odd Women’s Creation of a Desire for Romantic 1 Fulfillment, by Bonnie Zare Arthur Waugh Reminisces about Gissing: A Letter to 19 Herbert van Thal, by Pierre Coustillas Book Reviews, by David Grylls, Michael Cronin and Pierre Coustillas 24 Notes and News 33 Recent Publications 36 -- 1 -- The Odd Women’s Creation of a Desire for Romantic Fulfillment Bonnie Zare Wheaton College, Norton, Mass. Since the rise of feminist literary scholarship in the 1970s, feminist critics generally have opposed the marriage plot. They have tended to search for subversion in Victorian romances and scoff at conventional plots which marry off the heroine and thus ensure her absolute dependence on men. For instance, in Writing Beyond the Ending Rachel Blau DuPlessis observes that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fictional explorations of the female character through her relation to male love and approval helped the world shun women’s skills, talents, and capacity for independence, and that because twentieth-century women have dramatically changed their status they have “destabilized” the marriage plot or the “relation of narrative middles to resolutions” (4). George Gissing’s The Odd Women seems to destabilize the marriage plot by refusing to unite the dilettantish yet enlightened Everard Barfoot and the emancipator Rhoda Nunn. Furthermore, it contains a devastating critique of the institution of marriage, in the portrait of Monica’s and Widdowson’s life together.