Gissing Letters II

ELT : VOLUME 35:4 1992 of the war." Surely one does not need to refer to Fussell to discover this rather obvious fact; and surely one might reasonably expect, not this sort of perfunctory reference, but an extended discussion as to how Hynes's interpretation of the Great Disjunction, mythical or otherwise, differs from Fussell's. In this connection, too, it seems odd that there is no mention whatever of some of the most interesting work to appear on the First World War during the last decade or so, of, say, Eric Leed's No Man's Land (1975), Peter Buitenhuis's The Great War of the Words (1987), Stuart Wallace's War And the Image of Germany (1988), Modris Ecksteins's Rites of Spring (1989), or Claire Tylee's The Great War and Women's Consciousness (1990). All of these works contain general interpretations of the period which, one might have thought, would have made them useful in deepening and enriching Hynes's own book; in addition, they also contain specific information which touches directly on specific aspects of Hynes's book: the reaction of the British academic world, for example, which is treated at length in Wallace's book; the war against Germany which was simultaneously a war against Modernism in Ecksteins's; the propagandists activities of Wellington House in Buitenhuis's; or the role of women (including Rose Allatini's hitherto ignored novel Despised and Rejected) in Tylee's. For a study like A War Imagined which presumes to depict with authority how a whole culture was affected by a single great event, these are serious omissions. Nevertheless, when all the charges against this book are added up, they still do not suffice to put its essential value in doubt. There is no other cultural history of England during the war (the treatment of the twenties, however, is superficial except where it relates to the war) with anything like its scope and comprehensiveness, nor with anything like its skill and ease of presentation. For these reasons, it will undoubtedly take an honorable place alongside its two illustrious predecessors. Peter Firchow ___________________ University of Minnesota Gissing Letters II The Collected Letters of George Gissing: Volume Two, 1881-1885. Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, Pierre Coustillas, eds. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991. 400 pp. $55.00 VOLUME TWO of George Gissing's collected letters opens less than a year after the appearance of his first published novel, Workers in the Dawn. He is twenty-three, barely surviving in London, and virtually 476 BOOK REVIEWS unknown as a writer. But a few advanced thinkers like Frederic Harrison and his Positivist friends have taken Gissing up. They have found him tutoring and taking on newspaper assignments that bring in desperately needed money but distract him from writing fiction for much of the day. Only his fierce determination to make his way as a novelist enables him to produce the works of the five-year period covered by this volume: "Mrs. Grundy's Enemies," lost to us by the pusillanimous publisher George Bentley; The Unclassed, written in 1883 but published only in 1884; and Isabel Clarendon and A Life's Morning, both completed in 1885 but appearing only in 1886 and 1888 respectively. With a wife he is increasingly ashamed of, a scattering of unsympathetic relatives nearby, and few friends, Gissing, despite his new benefactors, sometimes perceives London as a "huge wilderness of a town . . . where one doesn't even know by sight—a fact—people who live in the same house." Adding to Gissing's alienation were some reviewers'complaints about the style of The Unclassed and its art-for-art's-sake theme, which Harrison especially disliked. But Gissing did not lose confidence in his literary mission. His letters show that he possessed the strong ego of the true artist. They also demonstrate that no matter how hard pressed he was, he made time to read English and classical literature, texts in French, German, and Italian, and historical and philosophical studies. Only indirectly related to novel-writing, such a rigorous regime drained energies already depleted by tutoring. Not only his own intellectual development but also that of his younger...