Gissing Bibliography

Book reviews automatizations over the whole of life"; a time when humanity had started "to derange itself, to automatize itself from the mental consciousness ." Insisting that he wants not "to derationalise" but only "to de-intellectualise" us, Lawrence argues that the proper use of the mind is to help us to loosen those "false, automatic fixations" that have us in their grip. Or to put it another way, it is to help us in "the all-too-difficult business of coming to our spontaneous-creative fullness of being," which means learning first how to recognize, then "how not to interfere " with, and finally how "to live from" those "spontaneous initial promptingfs]" that originate at "the great Source," those "four great centres or well-heads of our existence" that form our unconscious. In suggesting that Lawrence's view of the unconscious might possibly be seen as complementing that of psychoanalysis, I am thinking of such things as the importance D. W. Winnicott attached to spontaneity (see Adam Phillips's Winnicott) and of some of the ways in which Lawrence 's emphasis on the crucial importance of the mother-and-younginfant relationship (including what he has to say about the rhythm in maternal language [see Fantasia, 112]) anticipates later thinkers in the psychoanalytical tradition like Kristeva and Irigaray. Steele reminds us that "at an early stage [Lawrence] proposed 'Child Consciousness ' or 'The Child and the Unconscious' as a title for Fantasia of the Unconscious" and it seems to me that the second of these might well have been a better title for it. This is a fine new edition of two important books and one can only hope that it will encourage a more widespread discussion of them than we have had so far. Garry watson ________________ University of Alberta Gissing Bibliography Pierre Coustillas. George Gissing: The Definitive Bibliography. High Wycombe , England: Rivendale Press, 2005. xxxv + 604 pp. 24 illustrations. $90.00 £50.00 IN A SHORT but very busy life (he was dead at forty-six) George Gissing published one undoubted masterpiece, New Grub Street (1891), and another twenty-one completed novels (two published posthumously ), 115 short stories, and five volumes of prose. His letters comprise another nine handsomely published volumes. His career spanned the period from the three-decker to the cheap Edwardian reprint, and embraced the rise of the literary agent and other key modern shifts in publishing organisation. He shared a view of Benjamin Jowett's, who thought that happiness was mainly to be derived from work. As Jowett said, "What does matter is the sense of power which comes from steady 109 ELT 49 : 1 2006 working"—enabling "the power in a man to control and direct his own life instead of drifting on the currents of fortune and self-indulgence." Gissing's own output was one proof of that rich evangelical pudding. Here is the long-awaited bibliography which his considerable (and, in bibliographical terms, surprisingly complex) work justifies. It is justly described (without any hint of vainglory) by its publisher as definitive. It is the largest and by far the best enquiry ever conducted into the fascinating history of Gissing's works. It is the result of an extraordinary research effort over more than forty years, and it meets a long-felt need. It offers definitive exactness and evidence across a very considerable range of relevant and essential material. And it is much more than a bibliography. The book is based on the Coustillas's own collection of nearly 1,400 different editions and impressions, and on wide study of other holdings. Enormous numbers of books have been carefully examined—as have the author's papers, publishers' records, and other social and economic sources. There are several coherent, complementary and overlapping themes which focus on the creative process and on authorship as a profession defined by its relationship to publishers, and thus to audiences and the influence of economics. The work is both literary, critical , and historical. It offers an extensive study both of the books and of the manuscripts, which have been inspected when extant and where traced. It provides detailed information about the human and historical processes of composition and publication, and scholarly...