#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

[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

[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

[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...

[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

[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

[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)

[aliteraryprincess]

24 in 2024 - Final Update

Even though there are a few days left of the year, I'm going to call it on this. I read 21 out of 24 (87.5%), which is pretty damn good! I ended up switching Mortomley's Estate for a different Charlotte Riddell book, and I just never got to Richard & John. I'm actually currently reading The Stranger, but I know I won't finish it in the next two days.

Antigone by Sophocles (classic) 3.5 stars

Ariadne by Ouida (classic; dissertation) 2 stars

The Biographer’s Tale by A. S. Byatt (historical literary fiction) 2 stars (this is not, in fact historical fiction like I thought it would be.)

Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller (historical fiction) 3.5 stars

Cecilia by Frances Burney (classic) 5 stars

Contes by Charles Perrault (classic; in French) 5 stars

The Daisy Chain by Charlotte Mary Yonge (classic) 4 stars

Deerbrook by Harriet Martineau (classic) 5 stars

The Doctor’s Wife by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (classic; dissertation) 4.5 stars

Fairy Tale by Stephen King (fantasy) 5 stars

Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (classic) 4 stars

How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman (nonfiction) 4 stars

Ideala by Sarah Grand (classic) 2 stars

The Idiot by Elif Batuman (literary fiction) 4 stars

Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin (nonfiction) 4 stars

Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura (fantasy) 4.5 stars

Mortomley’s Estate by Charlotte Riddell (classic; dissertation)

New Grub Street by George Gissing (classic; dissertation) 4.5 stars

The Perpetual Curate by Margaret Oliphant (classic; dissertation) 4 stars

Richard & John: Kings at War by Richard McLynn (nonfiction)

Sister Novelists by Devoney Looser (nonfiction) 5 stars

The Stranger by Albert Camus (classic; in French)

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (classic; dissertation) 5 stars

The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare (classic) 4 stars