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Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 which they appear. Inexplicably the page numbers are omitted for the listing of the first lines of the untitled poems in two sections. The publication of this book is doubly notable, not only for making Gray's poetry available to the general reader, but as the first volume published in the new 1880-1920 British Authors Series being issued by ELT Press, "to fill a need ... for book-length studies on tum-of-thecentury British writers." Other books included in the series are George Gissing at Work: A Study of His Notebook 'Extracts from My Reading' by Pierre Coustillas and Patrick Bridgwater; as well as the forthcoming Herbert Home: Poet, Architect, Typographer, Art Historian by Dr. Fletcher; and J. M. Barrie: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography of Writings About Him by Carl Markgraf. Judging by the first volume in the series, it will be an important contribution to English studies of some interesting but neglected authors, and will add new dimensions to modern literary history. Edwin Gilcher _______________________________Cherry Plain, New York_____________ GISSING'S NOTEBOOK Pierre Coustillas and Patrick Bridgwater. George Gissing at Work: A Study of His Notebook 'Extracts from My Reading.' No. 2 in The 18801920 British Authors Series. Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1988. $25.00 Distributed in the United Kingdom, Europe and Japan by Colin Smythe Limited, Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. Appropriately, this new evidence of George Gissing^ scholarly interests is a notebook owned by an American college (Dartmouth) and co-edited by a Professor of English literature at a French university and a Professor of German at an English university. Gissing, after all, discovered his talent for fiction while in the United States, later discussed his literary ambitions most openly with a German, Eduard Bertz, and after attaining success gained a measure of happiness with a Frenchwoman in France. We have long known of Gissing^ prodigious and scholarly reading and rereading. It is evident in the Commonplace Book, edited by Jacob Korg in 1962; in his diary for 1887 to 1902, edited by Pierre Coustillas in 1978; and in his letters, many published in collections according to the recipients-his family, Bertz, Wells, W. H. Hudson, and so on. But none of these sources dwells exclusively on his reading, as does this notebook of 167 extracts copied out in his neat handwriting. Each bears his heading: for example, "Wisdom," "Epitaph," "Enthusiasm," and "Symbolization of Nature" for passages by Sophocles, Landor, 88 Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 Mmme. de Staël, and De Quincey respectively on the page reproduced for a frontispiece. Explaining their own prodigious labors, Coustillas and Bridgwater declare that, suitably edited, such a notebook provides the literary critic with "precious data," including "an index to artistic intentions, to the mental process which has been instrumental in the realization of the narrative" (1). They point to the attention that critics are giving to the notebooks of George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot. Concentrating on Hardy, they observe that his notebooks record reading undertaken in a conscious attempt to add an intellectual dimension to his fiction in response to criticism, whereas Gissing's excerpts reflect a more disinterested "enthusiasm for learning, for which his appetite was-and remained-boundless" (5). The entries in the notebook bear out the editors' analysis of them as showing Gissing's "predilection" for authors who "embraced the whole of life"-that is, philosophical writers. To some this may suggest that Gissing was not wholly committed to fiction as the best means of presenting human experience, for, as the editors note, even when he quotes a novelist it is in his or her "capacity as a thinker" (6). The notebook offers more than a hint that he still longed for the academic career he had lost through a youthful indiscretion. We might speculate about his psychological motivation in transcribing passages from works so unlike the kind of literature he was writing. Perhaps he felt some guilt about devoting time to his mental cultivation instead of getting on with his career as a novelist. If so, the mere act of transcribing the excerpts he had isolated as worthy of later consideration might seem to validate his self-indulgence...

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