Volume 26, Number 7 · May 3, 1979
Gissing and the Cruelty of Life
By Julian Symons
London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: The Diary of George Gissing, Novelist
edited by Pierre Coustillas
Bucknell University Press, 617 pp., $30.00
In February 1888 George Gissing learned that his wife Nell, an alcoholic and former prostitute whom he had not seen for more than three years, was dead. In company with his friend Morley Roberts he went to the wretched house in Lambeth where she lived, saw the body, registered the death, and arranged that the landlady and her husband should attend the funeral. He then returned to the room, and in his diary that night set himself to describe it:
Review, 3599 words
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