The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part III:

1897–1903

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Pierre Coustillas

The Heroic Life of George Gissing

George Gissing (1857–1903) lived a life worthy of the plot from one of his own novels. An exceptionally gifted man, born into relatively genteel comfort, he nonetheless managed to enter into two disastrous marriages with working-class women, got thrown out of university for stealing, spent a month doing hard labour in prison and died before the age of fifty. It is all the more surprising then, that he still managed to write twenty-three novels and over a hundred short stories, as well as works of literary criticism and a travelogue. This ambitious three-volume biography examines both his life and writing chronologically and in close detail. Coustillas’s exhaustive research is based on all the known surviving Gissing correspondence, Gissing’s works and every piece of literary criticism on Gissing from 1880 onwards. Press archives from England, America, the former Colonies, France and Germany have all been consulted. This approach, by the foremost authority on Gissing, allows new insights into his life and work.

This final volume in Coustillas’s prodigious biography examines the turbulent last years of the author’s life and his literary afterlife. After the break-up of his second marriage, Gissing’s health began to decline and he was diagnosed with emphysema, precipitating his permanent move abroad. In contrast to his personal problems, his literary reputation soared and he formed new friendships with other writers of the day, including Henry James and H G Wells. He wrote Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898), travelled to Rome in the same year and produced By the Ionian Sea (1901) about his 'rambles' in Calabria. The last of Gissing’s books to be published in his lifetime was The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). The most autobiographical of his works, it was also his favourite, and the most widely-read in the years after his death. He died in France on 28th December 1903.

Readership

Literature, Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Studies

Contents

Part V: Port after Stormy Seas
1 Third Italian Journey: Siena and Calabria (September 1897–December 1897)
2 From Rome to Surrey: Uncertainties Abounding (December 1897–June 1898)
3 ‘The Crown of Life’ (June 1898–May 1899)
4 The Ideal Put to the Test (May 1899–May 1900)
5 ‘Married’ Life in Paris (May 1900–May 1901)
6 The Invalid (June 1901–June 1902)
7 Swan Song (July 1902–December 1903)
Part VI: Epilogue
8 Assessment and Controversy (1904–6)
9 Gissing’s Afterlife: A Century On (1906–2003)
Bibliography
Notes
Index

Related titles

• Americans on Fiction, 1776–1900
• The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part I: 1857–1888
• The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part II: 1888–1897
• Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, Part I: George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Alfred, Lord Tennyson by their Contemporaries
• Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, Part IV: Henry James, Edith Wharton and Oscar Wilde by their Contemporaries
• Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, Part V: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and William Thackeray by their contemporaries
• The Correspondence of H G Wells
• The Journals and Diaries of E M Forster
• Writing the Self: Henry James and America

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