British Literature

Abstract

Although no country had more good novelists than Great Britain at the beginning of this century, the European naturalist movement (q.v.) had little direct effect on British fiction. It did, however, influence the work of George Gissing (1857–1903), who in turn has exercised a strong, although largely subterranean, influence on later writers (particularly on Orwell, q.v.). Gissing, an unhappy and unhealthy man, led a life of almost unrelieved misery. At college he stole to help a prostitute he had befriended; after serving a prison sentence he went to America for a year; he failed to support himself there, returned — and married the same woman. She was a nagging psychopath, and Gissing’s life was for ten years a nightmare. Then she died, and he went out and picked up and married a similarly impossible woman. When she became insane Gissing found a Frenchwoman who understood him and with whom he was happy. He never achieved financial stability, and kept his head above water only by constant overwork — which subsequently weakened his constitution and led to his early death. His close friend H.G. Wells (q.v.), who was with him at his death, wrote of him with great acumen: he called him ‘an extraordinary blend of a damaged joy-loving human being hampered by inherited gentility and a classical education’.