George Robert Gissing (1857–1903) was an English novelist. He is celebrated for the unflinching realism of his novels about the lower middle class; his works drew upon his own experiences of poverty and failure.
Born in Wakefield, Gissing seemed fated for an exceptional academic career at Owen’s College, Manchester. His progress ended abruptly at age 18 when he was sentenced to a month’s hard labor for stealing from friends at college to support a prostitute, Marianne “Nell” Harrison, whom he later married. (She did not reform and died of alcoholism.) He left for Chicago in disgrace, where he wrote a melodramatic tale of English life for the Chicago Tribune.
Gissing returned to England in 1877, writing many novels such as Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Nether World (1889.) The latter is considered one of the most graphic accounts of Victorian poverty ever written. After Nell died in 1888, Gissing traveled on the Continent and went on to produce some of his excellent fiction: New Grub Street (1891; about the life of a writer whose higher literary ambitions are set aside to scrape out a living,) Born in Exile (1892,) and The Odd Women (1893.)
Gissing moved to the south of France and wrote several books in the last five years of his life, including Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898; a critical biography,) By the Ionian Sea (1900; a travel book,) and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1902; an instantly successful spoof autobiography.) His Commonplace Book was published in 1962. The Diary of George Gissing, Novelist appeared in 1982.
Gissing’s biographies include John Halperin’s Gissing: A Life in Books (1982) and French literary scholar Pierre Coustillas’s The Heroic Life of George Gissing (3 vols., 2011–12.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by George Gissing
I have the happiness of the passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?
—George Gissing
Topics: The Present
Honest winter, snow clad and with the frosted beard, I can welcome not uncordially; but that long deferment of the calendar’s promise, that weeping loom of March and April, that bitter blast outraging the honor of May—how often has it robbed me of heart and hope.
—George Gissing
Topics: Hope
For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously.
—George Gissing
Topics: Weather, Courage, Bravery
The mind which renounces, once and forever, a futile hope, has its compensations in ever-growing calm.
—George Gissing
Topics: Acceptance
Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.
—George Gissing
Topics: Positive Attitudes, Optimism, Health
Life, I fancy, would very often be insupportable, but for the luxury of self-compassion.
—George Gissing
Topics: Realization, Acceptance, Awareness
It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience.
—George Gissing
Topics: Time Management
Time is money says the proverb, but turn it around and you get a precious truth. Money is time.
—George Gissing
Topics: Time Management, Time
I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
—George Gissing
Topics: Reading, Books
Have the courage of your desire.
—George Gissing
Topics: Desire, Courage, Bravery, Success
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