Cover of The Paying Guest by George Gissing Audiobook The Paying Guest
Audiobook · Sovereign

The Paying Guest

Author
George Gissing
Read by
Amara Wrenn
Language
English
Length
2 hours 35 minutes
ISBN
9781802566550
Published
31 May 2025
Imprint
Sovereign
  • George Gissing
  • satire
  • humour
  • British
  • materialism
  • consumerism
  • conformity
  • middle-class
  • lost generation
  • society

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Description

A respectable house takes a lodger because it must. Gissing’s Paying Guest is money in the parlour, a writer’s charm, and a woman whose chances are smaller than her mind. Victorian love under the meter: class, duty, the bill on the hall table. Louise as the guest who is not quite family. Respectability stretched to the landing. Gissing hears every creak of a house that needs the money and resents the need. Louise at the piano, the household counting every creak. Read in English, unabridged.

Author

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.

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