George Orwell, who was born in 1903, the year of George Gissings death, noted that most of Gissings works were already, by the 1940s, out of print and virtually unobtainable. He admired Gissings writing greatly. Orwell had read only a few of the novels, but "merely on the strength of New Grub Street, Demos, and The Odd Women I am ready to maintain that England has produced very few better novelists."

Yet George Gissing (1857-1903) is unknown to many, perhaps most, of the reading public. Many people have read at least one Thomas Hardy novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), for the simple reason that it was on some high-school English reading lists in the 1970s. (I strongly doubt that it is still on the school list, but thats another story.) Yet students are very unlikely to have read any novel of Hardys younger contemporary Gissing, which is a pity, because in many ways Gissing was the better novelist. Hardys great g ...

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