Meredith and Gissing: Fair Ladies in Revolt and Odd Women

Abstract

Meredith and Gissing may seem an unlikely combination. Meredith’s novels, presided over by the self-consciously sparkling and sometimes rather fey Comic Spirit and written in a style described by the Spectator as ‘affectedly grotesque’, contrast starkly with Gissing’s avowed ‘savagery’ and his grim and dogged pursuit of the real. Meredith, lionised towards the end of his life as the grand old man of English letters, the greatest of living novelists, has since slid steadily into a decent obscurity; Gissing, treated with wary respect by his contemporaries but never popular in his lifetime, now commands a growing band of devoted admirers and has been the subject of several recent studies. Yet both have consistently been regarded — when regarded at all — as champions of women. Richard le Gallienne, in the first full-length book on Meredith, declared that ‘there can be no doubt that woman has yet had no such ally in her oattle against masculinity as he’.¹ The Bookman found that Meredith ‘has ... his warmest admirers among women. Some of them hold him to be their best interpreter’.² And Laurence Housman rallied all suffragettes to the Meredith flag: ‘“Meredith”, wrote Stevenson, “is my leader, and I fight under his colours.” And those who are working for Women’s Suffrage might well make that phrase their own’.³