“Only when he had reached middle age did John marry; the experiment could not be called successful, and Mrs. Yule died three years later, childless.”
That little chilling word “experiment”! Quite a Gissing touch.
“I might make a good thing of writing against writing. It should be my literary specialty to rail against literature.”
Milvain’s ghost is evergreen. We now have many more literary specialties, with many subsets of literature for people to rail against.
A prickly chapter. Gissing never seems to leave any space for any wishful thinking, not for the characters, not for the readers, either.
Join us on December 13 for a virtual discussion of New Grub Street with Yiyun Li.
"If Germany would shut up her schools and universities for the next quarter of a century and go ahead like blazes with military training there'd be a nation such as the world has never seen."
Prescient! Something like this actually would happen, and Germany would become a nation such as the world has never seen. A horror.
in reference to Miss Harrow, "The greater part of her life she had spent as a governess; her position now is more agreeable, and the removal of her anxiety about the future had developed qualities of cheerfulness which formally no one would've suspected her to possess." This clear relationship between penury/financial uncertainty upon attitude/demeanor is not a revelation, but it's effect upon the characters must be considered