GISSING, GEORGE (ROBERT)

born Nov. 22, 1857, Wakefield, Yorkshire, Eng. died Dec. 28, 1903, Saint-Jean de Luz, France English novelist, noted for the unflinching realism of his novels about the lower middle class. Exceptionally precocious, Gissing was educated at a Quaker boarding school and at Owens College, Manchester, where his academic career was brilliant. His personal life was, until the last few years, mostly unhappy. His two marriagesthe first to a prostitute and the second to a servant girlbrought him little but misery and the life of near poverty and constant drudgerywriting, reading, and coachingthat he described in the novels New Grub Street (1891) and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). Before he was 21 he conceived the ambition of writing a long series of novels, somewhat in the manner of Balzac, whom he admired. The first of these, Workers in the Dawn, appeared in 1880, to be followed by 21 others. Between 1886 and 1895 he published one or more novels every year. He also wrote Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898), a remarkably able and perceptive piece of literary criticism. His work is seriousthough not without a good deal of comic observationinteresting, scrupulously honest, and rather flat. It has a good deal of documentary interest for its detailed and accurate accounts of lower-middle-class London life. On the social position and psychology of women he is particularly acute. He did not lack human sympathies, but his obvious contempt for so many of his characters reflects an artistic limitation. Gissing was deeply critical, in an almost wholly negative way, of contemporary society. The vulgarity, ugliness, and frustration of the life he described emerge powerfully; his delineation of character and of individual moral dilemmas is often penetrating; yet the total effect is somewhat lacking in artistic vigour. Of his novels, New Grub Street, considered by some critics to be his only great book, is unique in its merciless analysis of the literary life. In the last years of his life Gissing established a happy relationship with a Frenchwoman, Gabrielle Fleury, with whom he lived.