The Twayne Gissing

71 romantic-adventure—for which Stevenson is properly best known—on his own terms rather than tailoring him to a representational realist or a moralist suit and then deploring the fit. Furthermore, the approach through formalistic analysis and the iteration of Stevenson's Scottish connection are both limiting, choking off what could be promising avenues for exploring Stevenson and seeing him differently. A wavering and contradictory genius, beset with many problems both personal and artistic and essaying many different forms of writing, is bound to show up badly on the formalist form-sheet, whereas other approaches could well reveal another and more intriguing writer. The points at which he can be shown to be fudging his task or missing the mark or shifting his method could be the very points d'appui for essays of genuine reexamination. Such essays are only marginally to be seen in this collection. Accepted on its merits, it is respectable enough, but one may wish for a higher order of merit. Richard Carpenter Bowling Green State University 5. THE TWAYNE GISSING Robert L. Selig. George Gisslng. Boston: Twayne, 1983. $15.95 This is No. 346 in Twayne's English Authors Series, a figure which apparently confirms Thomas Seccombe's prediction in his introduction to The House of Cobwebs that Gissing would "sup late." It is indeed a matter for wonder that this volume should be published so long after similar monographs have been devoted to third- and fourth-rate figures of his day, for instance, Jerome K. Jerome, H. S. Merriman and John Davidson, to name three at random. Had it appeared fifteen or twenty years ago (at which time it was actually announced, though with another author's name), it would, of necessity, have broken new ground, since so little work was then being done on Gissing's life and writings. Professor Robert Selig's book, however, comes after a number of original studies have appeared in the 1970s and early 1980s, which means that he was confronted with an impressive variety of tasks to be performed within a very narrow framework; he had in particular to echo the various findings of recent scholarship as well as to offer a personal assessment of Gissing's twenty-odd novels and one hundred ten short stories, let alone the belletristic production. A daunting task, but in view of the complexity of the undertaking, he has acquitted himself well. The book is divided into ten chapters, the first of which is biographical and easily the most up-to-date and accurate brief summary available of Gissing's life, a "a life of errors and revisions." Not only does Selig give the main facts and put the works in the right perspective, he also corrects in passing some excusable errors made by his predecessors. Prominent among these corrections is that concerned with Gissing's academic record. It is now clearly established that young Gissing did not come out first for the whole of England at the Oxford Local Examinations in 1872, but first for the Manchester district and only twelfth in the kingdom. The critical discussion of the works spreads over eight chapters, which give a faithful notion of the pattern of Gissing's literary career. After the five working-class novels, ranging from Workers in the Dawn (1880) to The Nether World (1889), we pass 72 on to a group of stories devoted to "shabby gentility and upwards"—that is, the two enclaves within the working-class territory, Isabel Clarendon (1886) and A Life's Morning (1888), together with the Italian novel so variously appreciated in the last ten years, The Emancipated (1890). The two central chapters are devoted on the one hand to the major achievements, New Grub Street and Born in Exile, which show Gissing at the height of his powers, and on the other to a series of novels which Selig aptly calls "anatomies of mismarriage ," though they are many other things as well. His judgment concurs with that of other recent critics—The Odd Women, In the Year of Jubilee and The Whirlpool are powerful If controversial studies of Gissing's second period, when, after his semi-realistic, semi-romantic stories of lower...