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A review by michaelontheplanet
New Grub Street by George Gissing
4.0
Hack works: I’m starting to love George Gissing. After his odd women, the difficult men of Grub Street - hopeless Harold Biffen, idealistic Edwin Reardon (no, not him), both doomed while their unscrupulous foe Jasper Milvain - the “alarmingly modern young man” - prospers.
Milvain who’ll write - and marry - anything for money is the antithesis of writer as artist. Yet in a twist of fate, he, too ends up trapped, his need for money and approbation being the flame to his moth. Gissing is so good at lifting the rock of his Victorian world - the restricted lives and crushed hopes of those who weren’t privileged: the men without money or position, and of course the women. Marian, who finds her independence only to have to snatched away and Amy, who defies convention by refusing an ‘I’ll go where you go’ approach to her wifely duties.
What’s even more alarmingly modern is Gissing’s cynicism about love and money, and the attitude of writers to their craft and their audience - the good die young and the bad marry for money and continue to churn it out, les pisseurs de copie, as Madame Spark would have it, who despise their audience. Yet Reardon, and to a lesser extent Biffen, who should be the good guys martyred for their art, are sentimental, inflexible and unable to understand the motives of others, off the page at least.
As a piece of metafiction - one has a sense of the author looking down on his reader, a thin sneer playing on his lips - it sure takes a different tack to Jane Eyre.
Alarmingly modern (for 1891) indeed.
Milvain who’ll write - and marry - anything for money is the antithesis of writer as artist. Yet in a twist of fate, he, too ends up trapped, his need for money and approbation being the flame to his moth. Gissing is so good at lifting the rock of his Victorian world - the restricted lives and crushed hopes of those who weren’t privileged: the men without money or position, and of course the women. Marian, who finds her independence only to have to snatched away and Amy, who defies convention by refusing an ‘I’ll go where you go’ approach to her wifely duties.
What’s even more alarmingly modern is Gissing’s cynicism about love and money, and the attitude of writers to their craft and their audience - the good die young and the bad marry for money and continue to churn it out, les pisseurs de copie, as Madame Spark would have it, who despise their audience. Yet Reardon, and to a lesser extent Biffen, who should be the good guys martyred for their art, are sentimental, inflexible and unable to understand the motives of others, off the page at least.
As a piece of metafiction - one has a sense of the author looking down on his reader, a thin sneer playing on his lips - it sure takes a different tack to Jane Eyre.
Alarmingly modern (for 1891) indeed.