“My dearest, you are a perfect woman, and poor Marian was only a clever school-girl.”
Amy and Jasper are rewarded in the end. Marian is relieved somewhat by her job in the library and the death of her father. Gissing was a most reliable realist. There is not a smudge of wishful thinking allowed anyone.
“Trust me, there’s many a man who would like to be generous, but is made despicably mean by necessity.”
Ah, necessity. Reminds me of Richard II’s lament:
Shows us but this: I am sworn brother, sweet,
To grim Necessity, and he and I
Will keep a league till death.
The novel begins with the Milvain siblings and their mother, with everyone’s future uncertain. And now it closes with the siblings, with their futures all set, with the dead and the abandoned strewn behind, real and metaphorical bodies on the battlefield of literature.
Join us tomorrow, December 13, for a virtual discussion of New Grub Street with Yiyun Li.
A happy ending for Jasper and Amy.
Jasper and Amy shared the need for a place in society, and no one in that society cares to know about the buried bodies and broken hearts that form the foundation of their opulent position.
Dora and Whelpdale seem to have hit the sweet spot from our perspective, despite Jasper's assessment that Whelpdale, "as regards Society" will be a drag upon Dora.
To me, the enduring scene will be Jasper and Amy reveling In their precious social environs - Amy "At 40, at 50, ...would be one of the stateliest of dames." "Her words were uttered with just enough deliberation to give them the value of an opinion; she smiled with a delicious shade of irony; her glance intimated that nothing could be too subtle for her understanding."
But the words that will stay with me are "Marian was only a clever school-girl."