Gorgeous George Gissing

My latest pin-up.

I think I've found him: the male Victorian novelist who can write female heroines. It's such a relief. I've had a Dickens-shaped bee in my bonnet ever since writing that post on 6th February (The Visible Woman). I hope I'm not an essentially unforgiving person, but I find it difficult to overlook Dickens's saintly child-women on the grounds that he was a terrific story-teller, humanitarian, Genius...etc, etc. I mean, can any of that actually excuse the existence of Agnes Wakefield, "ever pointing upward...ever leading me to something better; ever directing me to higher things"? Ever making me wish I'd never got up today. Ever making me reach for the bottle. And if that's what a woman ought to be, according to the most incisive chronicler of the age...

Then along comes George Gissing and single-handedly rehabilitates Nineteenth Century Man. Well done, George. Granted he was forty-five years younger than Dickens, but he died in 1903 which makes him a bona fide Victorian gent in my book. Please, if you haven't already, read The Odd Women (how can you could resist the title?) and New Grub Street and the zillion others I haven't got round to reading yet. Gissing's women are wonderful. They can defy their fathers, abandon their husbands, even declare themselves as out-and-out feminists, and still retain moral complexity. Yes! I know! Can you imagine how Dickens would have dealt with a woman who leaves her husband for financial reasons and then (once he's dead) pilfers her own cousin's fiancé? Or an unashamedly intellectual single woman, bitterly opposed to the institution of marriage, who falls in love with but ultimately turns down our handsome hero? They'd be cardboard cut-outs, and as readers we would be expected to unite with Dickens in amused disapproval. Disapproval doesn't come into it for Gorgeous George, he just presents his readers with ordinary, complicated people and stands back without comment. I like that kind of modesty in a novelist.

By the by, his biography (or the little I've gleaned of it from Wikipedia) suggests to me he was a loveable chap. Maybe my criteria for lovability are a bit skewed, but this paragraph in particular made me want to hug him. See what you think:

"Gissing's academic career ended in disgrace when he fell in love with a young orphan prostitute, Marianne Helen Harrison, known as Nell. He gave her money in an attempt to keep her off the streets and when funds ran short he stole from his fellow students. The college hired a detective to investigate the thefts, and Gissing was prosecuted, found guilty, expelled, and sentenced to a month's hard labour in Belle Vue Gaol, Manchester in 1876."

Oh George.