Maybe twenty or thirty years ago I read George Gissings' classic novel The Odd Woman (1893) which is set in late Victorian England. I read it so long ago that I have forgotten many of the specifics but as I recall the novel centers around two young women who are struggling with the issue of marriage.
One of the women, Rhoda Nunn, is a suffragette and she worries that though she loves Everard Barfoot, the young man she is thinking of marrying, their union will endanger her independence which back in the 19th century was not an unreasonable thought for a woman to have. I remember really enjoying the Odd Women and I was also very impressed by Gissings' portrayal of Rhoda. There was no mocking of her fears. It was clear that the author understood Rhoda and women's suffrage and he was supportive of both.
I finished the Odd Woman vowing to read more from Gissing but it wasn't until 2018 that I got around to reading his greatest novel, New Grubb Street (1891), which I reviewed here at Reading Matters on June 9 2018. It was even better than The Odd Woman and so when the 2021 Back to the Classics Category - choose a classic by a favorite author came along I was planning to read another Gissing novel, The Nether World (1889) but I decided to go with a collection of his short stories instead.
That was a mistake. I just can't recommend these 7 short stories. Not enough work in my opinion was put into the writing and crafting and though I only finished these stories a few days ago I'd have to go back and reread them to remind myself who the characters were and the various plot lines. Still, reading these stories had a value in that as I have begun to go deeper into the work of George Gissing I am noticing certain themes. Here for example is a passage from his short story The Capitalist.
"Those were damned days! It wasn't the want of good food and good lodgings that troubled me most, -- but the feeling that I was everybody's inferior. There's no need to tell you how I was brought up; I was led to expect better things, that's enough. I never got used to being ordered about. When I was told to do this or that, I answered with a silent curse, -- and I wonder it didn't come out some times. That's my nature. If I had been born the son of a duke, I couldn't have resented a subordinate position more fiercely than I did".
And here is a passage from his short story The Poor Gentleman:
"In a sense, all the families round about were poor, but -- he asked himself -- had poverty the same meaning for them as for him? Was there a man or a woman in this grimy street who, compared with himself, had any right to be called poor at all? An educated man forced to live among the lower classes arrives at many interesting conclusions ... He saw around him a world of coarse jollity, of contented labor and of brutal apathy. It seemed to him more than probable that the only person in this street, conscious of poverty, and suffering under it, was himself".
The above quotes gives one a window into the kind of books George Gissing wrote and the way he saw the world. The subject of class, poverty, resentment towards the upper classes but not feeling he belonged with the lower classes either was not only the story of his fiction but his life and it was not an easy life. It was only towards the end, and Gissing died young at 46, that he found romantic happiness and he was beginning to finally make a decent living through his novels as well.
After George Gissing died his novels went into obscurity but not entirely and I sense a revival of his work is happening because great novels like The Odd Women and New Grub Street and great writers like George Gissing, never go out of fashion.
