Author · 35 titles

George Gissing

George Gissing (1857–1903) was the most unflinching realist of late Victorian England — a novelist who wrote what others preferred not to see. In New Grub Street he exposed the bitter economics of literary life: talent ground down by poverty, compromise, and the market. The Nether World, Born in Exile, and The Odd Women extended that clear-eyed vision to slum existence, intellectual exile, and the precarious lives of unmarried women. Gissing's own experience of hardship and disappointment shaped a fiction without consolation but rich in truth. He remains indispensable for readers who want Victorian London stripped of sentiment.

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