In the Library
New Grub Street
George Gissing, 1891
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 13 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 37
- Length
- Length 185k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Literature nowadays is a trade.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Lost Illusions
Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's Lucien arrives in Paris with a book of sonnets and learns that reviews are bought and sold, the first portrait of the market where Gissing's writers starve.
£1.99
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth does the same thing, but swaps the failing novelist for a woman crushed by the same marriage-market economics that undo Amy Reardon.
£1.99
About the book
A man bent over a manuscript he despises, counting the words that stand between his wife and the workhouse, a true novelist trying to manufacture a saleable book by the yard: this is Edwin Reardon. Across the city Jasper Milvain feels no such torment. He has grasped that literature is now a trade like any other, and he means to prosper by it. Between these two men Gissing anatomises the London of letters in the 1880s, where conscience starves in a cold back room while appetite dines out, and where Reardon's tenderness for Amy curdles as the rent falls due and love discovers it cannot live on nothing. Gissing wrote this out of his own years of hunger, and it shows: no book knows more exactly how want gets into a marriage and rots it from the inside. He grants no consolation that the good and gifted survive. What he offers instead is the terrible clarity of a man who had sat in that cold room himself, and could not look away.