“He was one of the cleverest and most learned of English writers, and one of the most blinkered.” So says Paul Delany on the curious combination of intellectual acumen and personal unwisdom in George Gissing, late-Victorian novelist and still insufficiently acknowledged chronicler of literary corruption, female aspiration and the struggles of exiled intellectuals. Gissing’s cleverness exhibited itself early. Sitting the Oxford Junior exam at 14, two years early, he came top in the region and won a scholarship to Owens College, Manchester. At 17, he took the English and Latin exams for the London University BA and came first in England. He never lost his appetite for learning. Apart from George Eliot, he was probably the most erudite of all English novelists. Fluent in Latin, Greek, French and German, he later added Italian and Spanish.

Gissing’s cleverness didn’t protect him from folly – in fact, by providing him with scholarship money, it probably contributed to his downfall. Living alone flush with funds near Owens College, he fell for a young prostitute, Nell Harrison, who gave him VD and spent his money at the pub. Hoping to set her up as a seamstress, he stole from the college cloakroom and was caught red-handed. Within a week, he was convicted of theft and sentenced to a month’s imprisonment with hard labour. The college’s star student disappeared: he was on a treadmill in Bellevue prison, climbing the equivalent of more than 10,000ft a day.

In a sense, the treadmill was a life sentence, for despite decades of drudgery in the Victorian literary market, so brilliantly exposed in his masterpiece New Grub Street, Gissing never surmounted the barriers thrown up by his devastating error. Released from prison aged 18, he sailed to America and survived in Chicago by publishing short stories. A year later he was in London with Nell – an alcoholic, he soon discovered, who sometimes financed her binges by returning to her former trade. His unsparing analysis of her pathology informed his first novel, Workers in the Dawn. Just before completing it, he married her.

As Delany shows, Gissing’s self-defeating streak was prominent in his relations with women. His marriage to Nell became hellish and they parted years before she died of syphilis in 1888. He succeeded in writing a series of fine novels, culminating in The Nether World, about urban squalor, marital anguish and the baffled hopes of futile idealists. But socially he remained an outsider. Hamstrung by his guilty secret, he hankered after highborn ladies but believed only a work-girl would marry him. In 1891, he married Edith Underwood, a tombstone-maker’s daughter. Though Gissing opined that she was “gentle and pliable”, she soon turned violent and suspicious. Inflexibly, he demanded domestic compliance and kept her in social isolation. In his riveting novel The Odd Women, similar male behaviour is mercilessly indicted. If only, as Delany laments, he “had not lost so much of his imagination and intelligence when he crossed the threshold of his home”. Gissing left Edith in 1897, and she died in a mental home. His final sexual relationship was with a refined French woman, Gabrielle Fleury, whom he lived with on the Continent until his death at 46 in 1903.

Delany’s is the first biography of Gissing since John Halperin’s naive and unreliable work of 1982. Although, like his, it contains factual errors (a picture of Gissing’s “mother” is actually his sister; names of characters are sometimes mistaken), it is far more judicious in its scanning of the fiction for biographical clues. But though lucidly written and carefully researched, it places too much emphasis on Gissing’s frailties as a man rather than his strengths as a writer. Constantly preferring the darker picture, Delany revives the claims – at best unproven – that Gissing died of syphilis and beat Nell with a stair rod. For all its virtues, this biography is unlikely to win new readers for its subject. A pity, for though not widely recognised today, Gissing’s fiction sweeps the reader into a teemingly peopled world of vividly realised documentary detail, edgy psychological suspense and unsparing moral analysis. The laureate of proletarian poverty, suburban vulgarity and cultural yearning, Gissing, if “blinkered” as a man, was piercingly perceptive as a novelist.

George Gissing: A Life by Paul Delany
Weidenfeld £25 pp444

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