New Grub Street
Set in the grinding literary marketplace of 1880s London, George Gissing’s 1891 novel measures two ways of making a living by the pen. Edwin Reardon writes for art and slowly starves, his marriage buckling as the money runs out and inspiration dries up. Jasper Milvain writes for the market, calculating and quick, and rises exactly as far as his cynicism will carry him. Around them move struggling reviewers, exhausted scholars, and women whose futures hang on a man’s success. Gissing knew this world from the inside, and his portrait of talent crushed by commerce remains one of the most honest books ever written about the writing life. Available here as a free PDF and EPUB edition.
About the Author
George Gissing (1857-1903) was an English novelist whose work drew on his own years of poverty and hardship. Author of New Grub Street and The Odd Women, he wrote unsparingly about class, money, and the frustrated ambitions of the educated poor in late Victorian England.
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