#george gissing

[blackswaneuroparedux]

London is a city where everyone is reaching out to create a future.

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903)

Piccadilly Circus, London, 1910.

[j-august]

Money is a great fortifier of self-respect.

George Gissing, New Grub Street

[calabria-mediterranea]

"Catanzaro must be one of the healthiest spots in Southern Italy; perhaps it has no rival in this respect among the towns south of Rome. The furious winds, with which my acquaintances threatened me, did not blow during my stay, but there was always more or less breeze, and the kind of breeze that refreshes. I should like to visit Catanzaro in the summer; probably one would have all the joy of glorious sunshine without oppressive heat, and in the landscape in those glowing days would be indescribably beautiful.

I remember with delight the public garden at Cosenza, its noble view over the valley of the Crati to the heights of Sila; that of Catanzaro is in itself more striking, and the prospect it affords has a sterner, grander note. Here you wander amid groups of magnificent trees, an astonishingly rich and varied vegetation; and from a skirting terrace you look down upon the precipitous gorge, burnt into barenness save where a cactus clings to some jutting rock. Here in summer-time would be freshness amid noontide heat, with wondrous avenues of golden light breaking the dusk beneath the boughs. I shall never see it; but the desire often comes to me under northern skies, when I am weary of labour and seek in fancy a paradise of idleness."

By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy, George Gissing (1901)

Thomas Miles Richardson Jr - Catanzaro, Calabria, Italy (1857)

Follow us on Instagram, @calabria_mediterranea

[julesofnature]

 “The mere chink of cups and saucers tunes the mind to happy repose.”  ~George Gissing

[litandlifequotes]

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.

The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft by George Gissing

[lissreads]

I love Gissing, but I've never heard of this one. I found it in the used bookstore today and risked my life climbing the shelves to reach it, so it better be good.

[judgingbooksbycovers]

The Odd Women

By George Gissing.

[quotation--marks]

In no woman on earth could he have put perfect confidence. He regarded them as born to perpetual pupilage. Not that their inclinations were necessarily wanton; they were simply incapable of attaining maturity, remained throughout their life imperfect beings, at the mercy of craft, ever liable to be misled by childish misconceptions. Of course he was right; he himself represented the guardian male, the wife-proprietor, who from the dawn of civilisation has taken abundant care that woman shall not outgrow her nonage. The bitterness of his situation lay in the fact that he had wedded a woman who irresistibly proved to him her claims as a human being.

George Gissing, The Odd Women

[biboocat]

Odd Women by George Gissing depicts the heart breaking plight of poor, unmarried Victorian women, their deprivations, fears, and limited opportunities for employment. We see how marriage can provide for their security and how it can imprison them. In contrast we see two remarkably progressive women partners who teach poor, unmarried women office skills and a sense of empowerment to help them escape abusive work and poverty. One of these women, Rhoda Nunn, struggles to maintain her own independence and standards of love when she is confronted with the possibility of marriage. It has a dour tone of realism throughout, but it’s a memorable work with strong feminist themes that remains pertinent today.

Memorable passage:

Like most men of his kind, he viewed religion as a precious and powerful instrument for directing the female conscience.

[whencyclopedia]

Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style

This book is recommended to academics and university students interested in different approaches to fiction writing and the evaluation of literary works published in the late Victorian period and early 20th-century literary criticism. Simon Reader provides a novel approach to the creative writing process and analyses the periphery of fiction.

Victorian literature often presents the two matching pieces of the same artefact – expressed and implied. Naturally, any work of literature written in this period carries traces of the obscure and intertwined. In Notework, Simon Reader draws attention to this fragmented aspect in his investigation of notes, diaries and writings of Charles Darwin, George Gissing, Roland Barthes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, and Vernon Lee. Having been motivated by Darwin’s concept of useless organs, Reader endeavours to understand the impact of these useless fragments on the published works by scrutinizing the disorganised aspect of writing and aims to reach beyond the limitations of form and genre in literature. This book is the most suitable for academics or university students interested in literary criticism or literary history.

Through problematising the literary approach of the New Criticism, Reader argues that close and minimalistic reading of any literary work perceives beauty only at the totality or within the bounds of the text, respectively, and disregards the value of the parts on their own. He illustrates how this approach would focus only on a narrow space of meaning. Instead of disregarding so-called useless texts, he employs them to peer through writers’ personal lives and writing processes. What Reader calls nonlinear style is the totality of personal expressions and textual interactions of these notes, diary entries and other affiliated fragments. However, not all fragments evolve into the parts of a whole or necessarily become related to the fictional product. In other words, they defy their own usefulness. Reader argues this moment as the point when we see fragmentary writing in its own elements. Ultimately, this book draws attention to the process of literary production and a deeper appreciation of a literary text.

In Part I, Reader analyses the nonlinear as a machinery of processing momentary ideas and aspirations. Darwin’s diary entries, for Reader, are instrumental in forming his ideas on evolution because they allow him to roam around natural forms and the environment without any specific aim or argument in need of evidence. This is also true for the novelist George Gissing, whose notes reveal a style of degree zero realism in writing that is free from the necessity of prescribed ends and motivations.

In Part II, the book investigates the nonlinear writing that accompanies the creation of literary work. For Hopkins, there exists an intangible relation between the animate and inanimate aspects of nature and through his notes and observations, the poet yearns to be a part of this vast collective being. Torn between his poetic aspirations and vocational commitments, Hopkins seems to have used the nonlinear style to achieve a congregation of fictional creators with the Christian god. In his study of Wilde’s notes, Reader sees a computer-like attitude for achieving a large flux of information and data.

Reader then steps into the domain of modernity and examines how nonlinear style can work outside the limitations of classical fiction writing. Part III uses the previous analysis of Darwin to examine Vernon Lee’s notes to show how Lee's nonlinear style is an expression of fluctuating aesthetic responses by relinquishing any pretence of genre and form in her career. True to the modernist statement on the possibility of presenting a coherent expression of life through subjective observations of the writer, Lee is in search of life scattered around through objects of triviality and recollection.

Reader, Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island, the City University of New York, concludes his project in a Darwinian way by proposing the existence of fragmented writings of an author beyond and independently from the affiliated work of fiction. He also foresees the possibility of recovering the individual via contemporary documentation of social media interactions and the impressions recollected through that documentation.

Continue reading...

[aliteraryprincess]

September 2024 Wrap Up

Thank god it's finally fall! I'm so excited for cooler weather. I finished drafting another dissertation chapter, which means I'm halfway through. Unfortunately, now I have to deal with job applications...

Books Read: 16

Check me out! To be fair, a lot of these are short since I was participating in Shorty September over on YouTube. But 16 is still pretty impressive! My favorite is Wylding Hall, closely followed by Fairy Tale. My least favorite was Life Studies, which I found quite disappointing. Titles marked with ® are rereads.

New Grub Street by George Gissing - 4.5 stars

Snow Drifts by Deven Philbrick - 4 stars

To Bedlam and Part Way Back by Anne Sexton - 4 stars

Fairy Tale by Stephen King - 5 stars

White as Snow by Tanith Lee - 4 stars

Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse by Mary Oliver - 4 stars

Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong - 4 stars

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo - 3.5 stars

The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare - 4 stars

Passing by Nella Larsen - 4.5 stars

Exit, Pursued by a Bear by E. K. Johnston - 5 stars ®

The Lady's Mile by Mary Elizabeth Braddon - 3 stars

Antigone by Sophocles - 3.5 stars

The Uninhabited House by Charlotte Riddell - 5 stars

Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand - 5 stars

Life Studies by Robert Lowell - 2 stars

On Tumblr:

And look at all these photos! I'm having a great time getting back into book photography, especially now that I have a nice camera. I also participated in a readathon hosted by @thereadingchallengechallenge, which was tons of fun!

August 2024 Wrap Up

Book Photography: Red Comet by Heather Clark

Book Photography: White as Snow by Tanith Lee

Book Photography: Fairy Tale by Stephen King

Book Photography: The Norton Shakespeare

Book Photography: Passing by Nella Larsen

Book Photography: Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

Book Photography: The Uninhabited House by Charlotte Riddell

Book Photography: Mini Book Haul

Book Photography: Life Studies by Robert Lowell

Tagged: People I want to get to know better!

TRCC Readathon

On YouTube:

This is the first time in a long time there are less things in this section than in the On tumblr section. I guess I just need a little break from filming.

August Wrap Up | 9 books!

Currently Reading 9/4/24

My Favorite Books Under 250 Pages | Shorty September

Ranking All the Shakespeare Plays I've Read | #shaketember

My Annual Overly Ambitious Victober TBR!

[fictionadventurer]

Victober Wrap-Up

The Romance of a Shop by Amy Levy: I read this one on October 1st. Very easy, very fun, if very underwritten, read about four sisters who open a photography shop. Gives a fascinating perspective on a different side of Victorian daily life.

The Europeans by Henry James: I forgot this one almost immediately after reading it, but I did enjoy it. The best way I can describe what I like about Henry James is that he writes like a woman. There's a concern for the inner lives of characters and the little moments of daily life that you usually don't see from male authors, and it works really well for the types of stories he tells.

Miss Meredith by Amy Levy: Short novella about a young woman who takes a job as a governess in Italy, and who gets a much nicer romance out of it than most of those types of characters. It's nothing ground-breaking, but it's fun to see her perspective on the setting, and the romance reminded me so much of some scenes from an old, beloved, abandoned WIP that I couldn't help liking it more than it probably deserved.

The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins: I loved the heroine of this book. I was so invested in her story. She was going to solve the mystery of her husband's past, no matter who stood in her way. Her (hilariously) pathetic wet napkin of a husband doesn't deserve her, but he needs her, and she loves him a lot, so I can root for them. It's astounding to me that a Victorian man can write such good female characters. They get to be people--strong-willed, intelligent, flawed, the center of their own stories rather than just a prop in someone else's. My love for Valeria papered over a lot of other flaws in this story (some not-great use of disabled characters, for one), and I'm seriously considering picking up another of his books next month. (They have perfect November vibes).

The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green: Not technically Victorian (it's American), but still the right time period. Apparently, this is where a lot of the detective genre started. I love the detective--he's got a quirk of not making eye contact with people, and I love that he's explicitly so working-class than he can't pass himself off as a gentleman for investigating this high-society crime--but I don't care about any of the characters, and the writing's not great. (Though it's kind of hilarious how often the narrator gets information because people come up to him and go, "You're a lawyer, right? Let me ask for advice about an intricate situation that just happens to tie into the case you're investigating.") I'm about 2/3 done with the audiobook, but it's going to be a bit of a slog to finish.

A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson: I'd probably find this a bit too cutesy most of the time, but I read this on a Sunday when I was feeling under-the-weather, and it was exactly what I needed. Very sweet, easy read.

Wuthering Heights by Emile Brontë: I made it a chapter and a half. It's a Hard No.

Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith: I heard it was short and funny, so I tried a couple of pages. Maybe there's a cultural divide, but I just wasn't feeling it.

The Odd Women by George Gissing: I tried a couple of chapter of the audiobook, because a story about women working as typists in late-Victorian England sounds right up my alley. I'm only two chapters in, but I'm debating whether to go further, because he already writes about women like a man--way too detailed descriptions of their physical appearance that suggest they're already decrepit in their early 30s, a suggestion that "we leave it to the men to decide if she'd be attractive"--and that doesn't bode well for a book with a female cast. It is just about to introduce the "progressive" woman who's about to drag the main characters into this newfangled job, so maybe it'd get better, but I'm not sure I'm invested enough to try.

[j-august]

"I maintain that we people of brains are justified in supplying the mob with the food it likes. We are not geniuses, and if we sit down in a spirit of long-eared gravity we shall produce only commonplace stuff. Let us use our wits to earn money, and make the best we can of our lives. If only I had the skill, I would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies. But it needs skill, mind you: and to deny it is a gross error of the literary pedants. To please the vulgar you must, one way or another, incarnate the genius of vulgarity."

George Gissing, New Grub Street

[calabria-mediterranea]

"Last night the wind changed and the sky began to clear; this morning I awoke in sunshine, and with a feeling of eagerness for my journey. I shall look upon the Ionian Sea, not merely from a train or a steamboat as before, but at long leisure: I shall see the shores where once were Tarentum and Sybaris, Croton and Locri. Every man has his intellectual desire; mine is to escape life as I know it and dream myself into that old world which was the imaginative delight of my boyhood. The names of Greece and Italy draw me as no others; they make me young again, and restore the keen impressions of that time when every new page of Greek or Latin was a new perception of things beautiful. The world of the Greeks and Romans is my land of romance; a quotation in either language thrills me strangely, and there are passages of Greek and Latin verse which I cannot read without a dimming of the eyes, which I cannot repeat aloud because my voice fails me. In Magna Graecia the waters of two fountains mingle and flow together; how exquisite will be the draught!"

By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy, George Gissing (1901)

[julesofnature]

 “The mere chink of cups and saucers tunes the mind to happy repose.”  ~George Gissing

[litandlifequotes]

For it is the mind which creates the world about us, and, even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched. 

The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft by George Gissing