Gissing Letters, 7

ELT 39:3 1996 generation of readers, one can hardly fault the editor. It is not only the nature of the texts, but the limitations of the medium that prevent this material from being presented in the forms necessary to serve all the purposes this edition strives to fulfill. As it is, this looks to be the best that could be done in one volume under the circumstances. S. W. ReÃ-d ___________ Kent State University Gissing Letters, 7 The Collected Letters of George Gissing: Volume Seven, 1897-1899. Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, Pierre Coustillas, eds. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995. Ix + 436 pp. $60.00 IT IS EASY to see why the Modern Language Association's 1995 Morton N. Cohen Award for a distinguished edition of letters has gone to the three scholars named above. Their latest volume of Gissing's correspondence amply illustrates the virtues named in the Prize citation : it contains an informative introduction, a useful chronology of Gissing's life, thorough annotations, and a generous number of illustrations . It is "beautifully produced." Some of the letters in this volume are known from earlier collections: those to Edward Clodd and to Gabrielle Fleury (edited by Pierre Coustillas ), to Eduard Bertz (edited by Arthur C. Young), and to H. G. Wells (edited by Royal A. Gettmann). But the hitherto unpublished letters and the general introduction—the longest in the series thus far—provide a new context for even familiar correspondence. Covering twenty-five months in a crucial period in the writer's life, the volume constitutes a kind of Divine Comedy in which Gissing, now entering middle age, goes from the dark wood of despair to the ecstasy of idealized love. "I have had a disagreeable experience," begins the book's first letter. Written in Calabria, it tells of the fever that has interrupted the Italian journey which will later provide vivid impressions for By the Ionian Sea and topographical detail for his historical novel Veranilda. He is able to continue his trip because of the compassionate care given him by a local physician in Cotrone (modern day Crotón). Like almost everyone else named in the letters, this good man is fully identified by the editors, and he is one of eleven individuals, including Gissing, shown in studio portraits. In Rome for the winter, the still-ailing author is troubled by a persistent cough. At forty he feels old. But his spirits lift with the arrival 348 BOOK REVIEWS of the ebullient H. G. Wells, who has been writing him witty letters embellished by his "picshurs." Wells and his wife have arranged their holiday in Rome to coincide with Gissing's stay in order to profit from his knowledge of classical culture (which later Wells will deprecate). The friends are at times joined by the novelists Ernest Hornung, soon to create the gentleman burglar Raffles, and Hornung's brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle. The four authors appear together in an amateur photograph looking slightly comical in hats. A young American journalist , Brian Boru Dunne, pictured separately, is also at times part of the group. The convivial interlude is all too brief. Back in England in April, 1898, Gissing buries himself in Dorking, Surrey, hiding from his estranged wife Edith and suffering from emphysema and intermittent eczema. Though two decades of writing have lifted him out of desperate poverty, the "battle for cash" persists, all the more urgent now because he is supporting Edith and their younger son, Alfred, in rooms in London, as well as their elder son, Walter, in the care of Gissing's mother and sisters in Wakefield. No wonder the beleaguered author seeks to maximize his income, which has never kept pace with his growing literary reputation. To circumvent the fee of his agent, William Morris Colles, he waits for direct commissions from editors before writing short stories, which have proved to be money spinners. When requested by the publisher Methuen to follow up his well-received critical study of Dickens with introductions to the novels, he agrees. Unfortunately, both Methuen and Colles fail him, Methuen by delaying the publication of The Crown of Life, Gissing's major work of this...