GISSING, GEORGE ROBERT English novelist, was born at Wakefield on Nov. 22, 18S 7. He was edu cated at the Quaker boarding-school of Alderley Edge and at Owens College, Manchester. His life, especially its earlier period, was spent in great poverty, mainly in London, though he was for a time also in the United States, supporting himself chiefly by private teaching. He published his first novel, Workers in the Dawn, in 1880. The Unclassed (1884) and Isabel Clarendon (1886) followed. Demos (1886), a novel dealing with socialistic ideas, was, however, the first to attract attention. Gissing's own experi ences had preoccupied him with poverty and its brutalizing effects on character. He made no attempt at popular writing, and for a long time the sincerity of his work was appreciated only by the few. But his unflinching realism, and the minute care of his descriptions of the sordid milieu of shabby London streets left their mark on the English novel. Among his more characteristic novels are : Tliyrza (1887), A Life's Morning (1888), The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891), Born in Exile (1892), The Odd Women (1893), In the Year of Jubilee (1894), The Whirlpool (1897). Others, e.g., The Town Traveller (19o1), indi cate a humorous faculty, but his novels are mainly concerned with the life of the poorer middle classes, with lonely men and women engaged in a generally hopeless struggle with fate and with the conflict between education and circumstances. The quasi-autobio graphical Private Papers of Henry R yecro f t (1903) reflects Gis sing's studious and retiring tastes. He was a good classical scholar and had a minute acquaintance with the late Latin historians, and with Italian antiquities; his posthumous Veranilda (1904) , a his torical romance of Italy in the time of Theodoric the Goth, was the outcome of his favourite studies. He died at St. Jean de Luz in the Pyrenees on Dec. 28, 5903.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-F. Swinnerton, George Gissing (1912) ; Morley Bibliography.-F. Swinnerton, George Gissing (1912) ; Morley Roberts, The Private Life of Henry Maitland (1912) ; M. Yates, George Gissing (1922); M. L. Cazamian, Roman et idees en Angleterre (1923) ; Letters of George Gissing to Members of his Family, collected & arr. by A. & E. Gissing (1927) ; see also introductory essay by T. Seccombe to The House of Cobwebs (1906), a posthumous volume of Gissing's short stories.