“Like the majority of London people, she occupied a house of which the rent absurdly exceeded the due proportion of her income.”
Some things never change. A Tang Dynasty poet famously said that a metropolis never offered any ease for its dwellers.
“She did not aim at intimacy with her superiors; merely at superiority among her intimates.”
Gissing at his most succinct.
“Like her multitudinous kind, Mrs. Yule lived only in the opinions of other people.”
Mrs. Yule in an Austen or Eliot novel would be purely comical or inept or pitiful, but Gissing has made her real. He doesn’t sugarcoat her flaws.
Join us on December 13 for a virtual discussion of New Grub Street with Yiyun Li.
My (trendy?) taste for authenticity recoils at the thought of 'living a lie,' and I found myself fantasizing that I might personally expose Mrs. Edmund for her persistent maintenance of the sham - "... every paltriness and meanness had always been concealed with the utmost care..." coupled with the human costs of the "perpetual effort to conceal the squalid background of what was meant for the eyes of her friends and neighbors." Gissing again deserves credit for his ability to intensify a point - topping it off with Jack's undeserved pomposity and disdain. I wish I could have scoffed in his presence as he contemplated talking to Edwin "in a fatherly way."
Lastly, and mostly - Amy’s response to Edwin taking the clerkship is more easily understood now that we’ve met her mother - she clearly didn't suck it out of her thumb!
There’s a kind of thrill in listening in on people living under other roofs -- yet will anyone be brave enough to confront the fact that the truth is much more unwieldy than any one person can lay claim to...the line about how wives have duties as well as claims feels like it’s from another era. Thinking recently about truth and about the obligation to tell the truth when the truth is so dependent on understanding. A boy at the Hi! Desk answered “no” when a librarian asked him if he had a library card, when his mother stepped in and said, yes, you do have a card, just not with you. The boy’s next answer to whether he wanted a receipt was “yes”. Who needs the savior robots on Mars when we have humans to observe?