Gissing Letters, 8

ELT 40:2 1997 tions of the great energy with which they, Clive, and Duncan played "war games" at Wissett. Though pro-German feelings withered away in this community during World War II, we surprisingly learn that Clive Bell was pro-Hitler. Quentin with characteristic understatement "never found [Clive] great fun after the advent of Hitler. Taking an interest in politics, feeling, as I do, that Jews are the salt of the earth, it was too difficult." And perhaps here we find a more important dimension of Bloomsburys "morality." As with the new acknowledgement, that Leonard Woolf was "largely introduced to politics by women and some of his first works of political journalism were concerned with women. I do not think that he ever spoke or wrote about the men of the co-operative movement with anything like the enthusiasm which he felt for the Women's Guild." We are reminded of Virginia's own gesture of friendship and admiration in her preface to Life as We Have Known It, a collection of writing of the Women's Cooperative Guild. She writes of the way that the working class women leaders "touched nothing lightly. They gripped papers and pencils as if they were brooms." In this charming memoir with its honesties and silences, we read of the personal underside of a Bloomsbury that flourished from about 1914-1941, geographically situated in Gordon and Tavistock Squares in London. Because the minds of Bloomsbury, Leonard and Virginia's among others, were spread across the stretch of England in art, politics and economics, we are curious about the personal stories that Quentin recounts with wit and savoir-faire in Bloomsbury Recalled. Patricia Laurence _____________ City College of New York Gissing Letters, 8 The Collected Letters of George Gissing: Volume Eight, 1900-1902. Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, Pierre Coustillas, eds. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996. xlix + 444 pp. $70.00 YOUNG GEORGE GISSING felt mobile in Victorian London: when a landlady or lodging proved obnoxious, he simply packed up his few belongings and moved on. He did more or less the same thing when his two wives proved incompatible. As this volume opens, however, he faces constraints resulting from his liaison with a French woman, Gabrielle Fleury. They are living as man and wife in the Paris apartment she shares with her widowed mother. "Maman" is far more refined than the landladies and wives who bedeviled his earlier existence, but she is 184 BOOK REVIEWS proving to be just as tyrannical. She rules the kitchen, keeping Gissing on a meager diet that is injurious to his health, and neither she nor Gabrielle will consider living out of Paris, except for summer holidays, though Gissing thinks the city's climate is bad for him. Gissing gains temporary relief from these unsatisfactory circumstances on two occasions by returning to England. In the spring of 1900 he visits his family in Wakefield, which now includes his elder son, Walter, in the care of Gissing's mother and sisters. (During the period covered in this volume his second wife, Edith, is removed from her Brixton house to an asylum because of violent outbursts, and their younger son Alfred, until then in her care, is sent to live on a farm in Cornwall, events Gissing learns of with relief.) Gissing also sees the now prospering H. G. Wells and his wife (Amy Catherine Robbins, known as Jane), the always cordial Edward Clodd, the aged and revered George Meredith, and his incomparable literary agent J. B. Pinker. The following year he returns to England with Gabrielle to be photographed for an article on him by Morley Roberts, who, finally coming into his own as a novelist and journalist, hopes to boost the sales of his old friend's books. Staying on with Wells and his wife for a month after Gabrielle returns to her demanding mother, Gissing gains weight on Jane Wells's nourishing meals. But his condition is still so alarming that he yields to the urging of Wells and two physicians and enters the East Anglian Sanatorium run by Dr. Jane Walker, who is pioneering the open air treatment of tuberculosis. Under her regime, which includes...