The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

George Gissing (1857-1903) was an English novelist, noted for the unflinching realism of his novels about the lower middle class. Gissing was educated at Owens College, Manchester, where his academic career was brilliant until he was expelled (and briefly imprisoned) for theft. The life of near poverty and constant drudgery-writing and teaching-that he led until the mid-1880s is described in the novels New Grub Street (1891) and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). Before he was 21 he conceived the ambition of writing a long series of novels, somewhat in the manner of Balzac, whom he admired. The first of these, Workers in the Dawn, appeared in 1880, to be followed by 21 others. Between 1886 and 1895 he published one or more novels every year. He also wrote Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898), a perceptive piece of literary criticism. His work is serious-though not without a good deal of comic observation-and scrupulously honest. On the social position and psychology of women he is particularly acute: The Odd Women (1893) is a powerful study of female frustration. Gissing was deeply critical, in an almost wholly negative way, of contemporary society.