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Simon J. James examines how Gissing's work reveals an unhappy accommodation with money's underwriting of human existence and culture, and how daily life in all its forms – moral, intellectual, familial and erotic – is transcended or made irrelevant by its commodification.
Reproduction of the original: Demos by George Gissing
Even though his books never sold as well as those of more popular novelists, women in particular liked George Gissings work and often wrote to him for advice. They could see he was keenly interested in the lives of women and the long struggle to improve their condition in a gender-restrictive society dominated by males. Though Gissing tried to champion the womens cause, he did not entirely succeed. Perhaps he was too close to the changes affecting women to understand their situation fully. Perhaps with individual women a tenacious idealism blurred his vision. Perhaps the facts of his life and experience prevented a balanced judgment. Yet if he could say at the end of his career that he knew nothing at all about women, it was not because he had failed to write about them or to make a thorough study of them. Gissing used the woman question of his day to create female characters as much alive now as when he first began to write.
George Gissing's books, published during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, are memorable for their portraits of women. Only a few women played active roles in his life, but those who did exerted a lasting influence. In each of his novels he portrayed women vividly and with unerring realism. He worried, in fact, that some might see themselves in his books and rebuke him. His portraits of women are warm and human, revealing an essential sympathy that makes them timeless. An important feature of his novels, his feminine portraiture is worth careful study.