BOOKS
CATEGORIES:
- VIEW ALL
- 101-Page Classics
- American Classics
- Collections
- English Classics
- Evergreens
- French Classics
- German Classics
- Gothic Classics
- Great Poets Series
- Great Women Writers
- Irish Classics
- Italian Classics
- Non-Fiction
- Other Literatures
- Poetry
- Russian Classics
- Scottish Literature
- Short stories
- Syllabus / GCSE
- Theatre
New Grub Street
ISBN: 9781847499219
672 pages
RRP: Original price was: £8.99.£7.19Current price is: £7.19.
In late-Victorian London, two writers of radically different temperaments pursue contrasting approaches to the literary life. The first, the talented and cerebral novelist Edwin Reardon, appears to be doomed by his idealistic nature to a life of impecuniousness, whereas the second, the driven but cynical journalist Jasper Milvain, continually reaps the material rewards of a career devoted to market-driven hack writing. When Reardon’s intransigent sense of artistic integrity leads to the breakdown of his marriage, he begins to learn the true cost of his commitment to elevated principles and his refusal to pander to the demands of the marketplace, as the fates of the two rivals become ever more intertwined.
Published in 1891, and described by Orwell as “Gissing’s masterpiece”, New Grub Street is a powerful, haunting exploration of the plight of the professional writer in a philistine age, and of the perennial dichotomy between literary merit and commercial success.
Part of Alma Classics Evergreens Series
REVIEWS
[New Grub Street] is the most impressive of Gissing’s books… To a professional writer it is also an upsetting and demoralising book, because it deals among other things with that much-dreaded occupational disease, sterility.
George Orwell
Important… New Grub Street is Victorian in its realist depiction of a society in transition, but modern in its portrait of the artist as an existentialist character making his solitary way in the world
Robert McCrum
The ObserverNew Grub Street is not a very cheerful book, but as a study in the pathology of the literary life it is unequalled, and still surprisingly relevant
David Lodge, Independent
A great novel about creativity and money and marriage, and its greatness lies in the subtlety with which these three subjects become co-dependent on one another
The Guardian
It is George Gissing’s triumph, in New Grub Street to have written a novel about writing for a living which is as graphic, as realistic and as dispiriting in its way as anything written by Emile Zola on the plight of coalminers
Sunday Times
