The Heroic Life of George Gissing

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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, over a hundred short stories, as well as works of literary criticism and a travelogue. This ambitious three-volume biography on Gissing examines both his life and writing both 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.

• The most extensively researched biography of Gissing ever published
• Charts both Gissing’s personal and literary life in detail, using a wide range of sources
• Examines for the first time the growth of Gissing’s reputation over the century since his death

Readership

Literature, Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Studies

Editorial board

Pierre Coustillas is editor of the Gissing Journal and has co-edited the nine volumes of The Collected Letters of George Gissing (Ohio University Press, 1990–7). He is the author of George Gissing: The Definitive Bibliography (Rivendale Press, 2005) and co-edited George Gissing: The Critical Heritage (Routledge, 1972). He has also published extensively on Victorian and Edwardian Literature.

Published titles

• The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part I : 1857–1888
• The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part II : 1888–1897

Forthcoming titles

• The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part III: 1897–1903

  Pierre Coustillas

  (July 2012)

Download leaflet pdfs

• George Gissing: colour leaflet

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