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“... My great-aunt Clara and George Gissing were friends during the last ten years of his life. He wrote to her about once a week, always as Miss Collet, and quite often bared his soul to her. She was an expert on women’s work and a civil servant. During his lifetime she gave him money to educate his sons, and after he died she not only arranged with Downing Street for a Civil List pension for them ...”

“... George Gissing was convinced that the year 1900 would make all the difference. Writing his study of Charles Dickens in the late 1890s, he refers to his own generation as those ‘upon whom the new centurys breaking’. And one of the things the new century would bring was the New Woman. To an extent, of course, as Gissing realised, she had already arrived ...”

“... weeks, and I have a glimmering as to what it is that prompts the converted to claim so much for Gissing. But my own view, which is very commonplace, remains the same: New Grub Street is a novel of extraordinary power, and without it the oeuvre would be no more than the interesting record of a pained but minor artist. John Halperin, of course, takes a ...”

“... For Gissing,’ Paul Delany notes, ‘writing was a grim and lonely task, made grimmer by one of the most disastrous family lives of any English writer. At times this misery threatened to become contagious.’ This confession comes at the end of Delany’s engaging new biography of George Gissing, and suggests the special difficulty of spending long periods in the company of the English novelist most known for the relentless pessimism of his novels and the self-destructive tendencies of his life ...”

“... to the cause. I took the latter path, pursuing eccentric interests in Arthur Hugh Clough and George Gissing, and developing a critique of fiction based on a very superficial reading of what I took to be Existentialist ethics, mauvaise foi and all that. For Leavis the study of English was intended to foster the critical discrimination that would ...”

“... and their sprightly utterance? Even old loyalties turned a bit sceptical. In her Memories of George Meredith one of his fans, Lady Butcher, recalled how he had thrilled her with his first inspiration for One of Our Conquerors, as they walked together on Box Hill. As I listened to his wonderful voice telling of the tragic history of Nathalie and the ...”

“... share a concern with changing gender values, sexual ‘deviance’ and whatever else allowed George Gissing to describe the late 19th century as a time of sexual anarchy? Or has Showalter merely been able to present similar myths und images by cleverly shuffling the information – and there is plenty of it – that her research assistant has ...”

“... the Jewish Cockney actress Miriam Rooth claims to be in the same style as ‘that woman’, and George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth foolishly thinks of herself as destined for stardom because she is more beautiful than the ‘thin Jewess’. Rachel not only dominated the Paris stage but performed in London, St Petersburg and New York; she may have been the ...”

“... a ‘plutocracy’ and denouncing it as a conspiring and corrupting influence on public life. George Gissing believed that the ‘brute force of money’was blocking more humanising influences and producing mere mechanistic amorality. A.G. Gardiner was shocked at the ‘feverish excitement’ which gripped the public mind at the time of the South ...”

“... education, and she was financially self-sufficient throughout her long career. A friendship with George Gissing (they corresponded at least once a week for ten years) admitted her to a world of artistic achievement. She embodies the independence of the new woman. Yet she emerges from Jane Miller’s description as a figure torn by the intractable ...”

“... a curiously impressive and distasteful laconic relish. Possibly Rose Boyt is about to become the George Gissing of our day. Rebecca Brown, looking at family life, is more inclined towards a kind of allegory. The Children’s Crusade presents childhood and families as battlegrounds, campaigns, cold wars, in which love and loyalty are tested to ...”

“... turbot and apple pudding, if you want full details.)’ To whom is he talking? His other selves? George Gissing is recording yet another doleful fact, as an aide-mémoire and warning to himself, when he writes: ‘Not quite six pages. Bought some bottled ale, thinking it might help me to sleep if I drank some before going to bed.’ Naturally enough, it ...”

“... everyday background, setting off the styles and surprises of less ordinary purchases. When George Gissing, in New Grub Street, wanted to think of a title for the ultimate unsellably boring book, he came up with Mr Bailey, Grocer. So Anna Sam’s Checkout fills a gap in what was never imagined as any kind of market. It really is an account of what ...”

“... of enemies. Educated liberals, especially, accused him of lowering the tone of national debate. George Gissing was levelling this charge even before the Mail was founded. Once its anti-German campaign started, many claimed that it was making foreign tensions worse. Northcliffe has never ceased to be an object of fascination; fourteen books about him ...”

“... Explanations’, links these testaments with the fictional narrator of a late story called ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’, in which Silverman attempts to justify his life but succeeds only in revealing the implacable nature of his resentments. It’s a wry move and characteristic of Slater’s acute critical intelligence. His detailed commentary ...”