George Gissing

The Nether World (1889) is generally regarded as the finest of Gissing's early novels. A fast moving story of highly dramatic, sometimes violent scenes, it depicts life amongst the artisans, factory-girls, and slum-dwellers of Clerkenwell in the 1870s. But this is not just a novel of documentary realism. It is one man's mordant vision - shaped by bitter personal experience of poverty - of the quality of life endured by a variety of characters in the nether world. With Zolaesque intensity and relentlessness, Gissing lays bare the economic forces which determine the aspirations and expectations of those born to a life of labour. This is a tale of intrigue, as rapacious schemers try to wrest a fortune out of a mysterious old man who has returned to their midst, and of thwarted love. There is no sentimentality. This is a world in which the strong exercise power against their own kind, scheming and struggling for survival, a world from which, Gissing bleakly maintains, there can be no escape. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

`there are half a million more women than men in this unhappy country of ours . . . So many odd women - no making a pair with them.' The idea of the superfluity of unmarried women was one the `New Woman' novels of the 1890s sought to challenge. But in The Odd Women (1893) Gissing satirizes the prevailing literary image of the `New Woman' and makes the point that unmarried women were generally viewed less as noble and romantic figures than as `odd' and marginal in relation to the ideal of womanhood itself. Set in grimy, fog-ridden London, these `odd' women range from the idealistic, financially self-sufficient Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn, who run a school to train young women in office skills for work, to the Madden sisters struggling to subsist in low-paid jobs and experiencing little comfort or pleasure in their lives. Yet it is for the youngest Madden sister's marriage that the novel reserves its most sinister critique. With superb detachment Gissing captures contemporary society's ambivalence towards its own period of transition. The Odd Women is a novel engaged with all the major sexual and social issues of the late-nineteenth century. Judged by contemporary reviewers as equal to Zola and Ibsen, Gissing was seen to have produced an `intensely modern' work and it is perhaps for this reason that the issues it raises remain the subject of contemporary debate. *Introduction *Textual Note *Bibliography *Chronology *Explanatory Notes *Map ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Charles Dickens was in his own day the most popular novelist who had ever lived, a public figure adored like a present-day pop star. He still holds his place as one of the greatest English writers, an original genius whose novels are an essential link in the canon of English literature. He was also actively involved in the life of his time, campaigning for social and educational reform and sharply critical of contemporary society. This short biography provides an excellent introduction to Dickens, from his disturbed childhood with a traumatic period working in a blacking factory, his instant success as a young writer and his tumultuous acclaim in both England and America, the major novels of the 1850s and '60s and the establishment of Household Words, to the final years as a public performer of his own work.

New Grub Street is the only one of George Gissing's two dozen novels never to have gone out of print, and has long been recognized as the most important novel of the nineteenth century on the subject of the writing professions. Indeed, no novel in the English tradition even remotely approximates the thoroughness, sophistication, and clear-sightedness with which New Grub Street explores the social and economic contexts in which writing, publishing, and reading take place. The critical introduction to this edition gives an account of Gissing's life and times and an overview of the most important stylistic and thematic features of New Grub Street; special attention is given to the writing and publishing professions in late-Victorian England, emphasizing the range of social and economic positions that writers occupied during the period. This Broadview edition also includes a rich selection of historical material on the literary world of London through the centuries, authorship as a profession, and Gissing's life and work.