George Gissing Biography Quotes 10 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
George Robert Gissing was born in 1857 in Wakefield, Yorkshire, into a lower-middle-class household that prized learning and self-improvement. His father worked as a chemist and druggist, and the household atmosphere encouraged bookish ambition. Gissing showed precocious talent, winning scholarships to Owens College, Manchester, where he excelled in the classics and displayed the disciplined reading habits that would shape his prose. His student years, however, were also marked by emotional intensity and a sense of social responsibility that would later inform his fiction.

Fall and Exile
While at Owens College, Gissing became involved with a young woman in precarious circumstances, and in an attempt to support her he committed theft from fellow students. The incident led to a conviction and a prison term, and he was expelled from the college. The disgrace cut him off from a straightforward professional path. After release, he left for the United States, where he supported himself as a teacher and began to write in earnest. The experience of isolation, hard work, and poverty in a society devoted to commerce sharpened his view of the pressures facing the individual in modern life. He drafted material for his first novels and learned the daily discipline that would carry him through the next two decades.

Return to England and Apprenticeship as a Novelist
Gissing returned to London and published his debut, Workers in the Dawn, at his own expense. He lodged in modest rooms, lived frugally, and dedicated his days to writing and long, observant walks. The city was his laboratory: he noted the routines of clerks, shopgirls, and struggling men of letters, building the social textures that would become the hallmark of his fiction. He steadily produced novels such as The Unclassed, Demos, Thyrza, A Life's Morning, and The Nether World, works that mapped the strata of Victorian urban life with unusual candor. His younger brother, Algernon Gissing, himself a writer, was among the few steady presences who understood the rigors of the life George had chosen.

Marriages and Domestic Turmoil
Gissing's personal life was as troubled as the worlds he depicted. His first marriage, to Marian (Nell) Harrison, a woman he had known since his student days, brought material hardship and emotional strain. The union, shadowed by poverty and illness, fed his acute sense of how class and circumstance can trap individuals. After Marian's death, he married Edith Alice Underwood. That marriage, too, was unhappy and volatile, and it eventually broke down amid profound incompatibilities and Edith's severe mental distress. They had two sons, toward whom Gissing felt a strong responsibility despite the domestic turmoil. Family and friends helped sustain him during separations and relocations.

Friends, Allies, and Literary Circles
Although temperamentally solitary, Gissing was not isolated from the literary world. He corresponded with and was supported by contemporaries who admired the fierce honesty of his work. H. G. Wells, among others, took a serious interest in his writing, and the novelist Morley Roberts was a friend who later drew on their association for a thinly veiled portrait that testified to Gissing's character and struggles. These relationships offered moral support even when they could not resolve his chronic financial insecurity.

Major Works and Themes
New Grub Street (1891) secured Gissing's reputation. Set among writers, editors, and publishers, it anatomized the clash between artistic conscience and the literary marketplace with unsparing realism. Born in Exile (1892) explored ambition and social mobility, while The Odd Women (1893) confronted the changing roles of women, education, and marriage with unusual sympathy and skepticism. In In the Year of Jubilee, Eve's Ransom, and The Whirlpool, he examined suburbia, consumer culture, and the psychology of desire, continuing to trace the costs of modernity on inner life.

Gissing admired Charles Dickens yet measured that admiration against a cooler realism; his Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898) combined homage with analysis. He was drawn to continental naturalism and read authors such as Emile Zola, whose influence can be felt in Gissing's social anatomies and his refusal to idealize poverty. Travel enriched his perspective: By the Ionian Sea (1901) is both a record of journeys in southern Italy and a meditation on the classical past set against contemporary decay. Late in life he turned inward in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), a reflective, autobiographical work that found a wider readership and brought him a measure of consolation and recognition.

Later Years and Final Companionship
By the late 1890s, Gissing's health had begun to fail. He suffered from chronic respiratory ailments and the cumulative strain of years of overwork. His second marriage had collapsed, and he lived apart from Edith. In these years he formed an important relationship with the French intellectual and translator Gabrielle Fleury. Their companionship offered him a steadier domestic atmosphere and a bridge to continental literary culture; they spent extended periods in France, where he could work in relative peace. Through illness and travel, he persisted in drafting fiction and essays, sustained by the encouragement of friends and the growing respect of peers who recognized the integrity of his art.

Death and Legacy
Gissing died in 1903 in the French Basque country, his health worn down but his reputation rising. He left behind a body of work that, taken together, forms one of the most exacting portraits of the English lower middle class at the end of the nineteenth century. His novels, rooted in the details of rent, employment, and domestic strain, challenge sentimental views of progress by revealing how ambition, morality, and economic necessity grind against each other. The figures who shaped his life and work, Marian (Nell) Harrison, Edith Alice Underwood, his loyal brother Algernon, friends such as Morley Roberts, and sympathetic contemporaries like H. G. Wells, stand in the background of his pages, reflections of the real networks of care and conflict he knew.

Gissing's prose, cool and balanced, conceals the intensity of his ethical concerns. He was neither a doctrinaire reformer nor a complacent observer. Instead, he wrote about the conditions under which people try to remain honest, affectionate, and intelligent in a world organized around money. That subject made him a novelist's novelist in his own day and has kept New Grub Street, The Odd Women, and Henry Ryecroft in active circulation. His life, brilliant promise, public disgrace, hard-won mastery, and fragile late happiness, mirrors the arc of the very society he scrutinized, and his books endure as one of the clearest windows onto the making of modern literary and urban experience.

Our collection contains 10 quotes who is written by George, under the main topics: Motivational - Wisdom - Deep - Free Will & Fate - Book.