This ambitious three-volume biography on Gissing examines both his life and writing both chronologically and in close detail. Part II assesses the period of Gissing’s greatest authorial triumphs. His most critically acclaimed works, The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891) and The Odd Women (1893) date from this time.

This ambitious three-volume biography on Gissing examines both his life and writing chronologically and in close detail. Part I covers Gissing’s early life up until his establishment as a writer of moderate critical success.

This ambitious three-volume biography on Gissing examines both his life and writing chronologically and in close detail. Part I covers Gissing’s early life up until his establishment as a writer of moderate critical success.

My Victorians is a hybrid in both form and content, part memoir/extended lyric essay but also a work of biography, photography, and cultural, literary, and art history. This is a travelogue of writer Robert Clark’s attempt to work through a sudden and inexplicable five-year-long obsession focused on Victorian novelists, artists, architecture, and critics. He wends his way through England and Scotland, meticulously tracking down the haunts of Charles Dickens, George Gissing, John Millais, the Bloomsbury Group, and others, and documenting everything in ghostly photographs as he goes. As Clark delves deeper into the Victorian world, he wonders: What can its artists offer a twenty-first century writer by way of insight into his own life and work? His obsession with Victoriana bleeds into all aspects of his life, even the seemingly incongruous world of online dating. My Victorians is in the spirit of Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage and Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch. This book considers what happens when heartbreak, eros, faith, and doubt drive us to take refuge in the past.

New Grub Street: Large Print by George Gissing For many readers New Grub Street is Gissing's masterpiece. If this is not accepted, it remains beyond doubt one of his most interesting and most powerful novels. As a realistic picture of the literary in late Victorian England, New Grub Street has few rivals. There is much of Gissing himself, his idealism, pride, impracticality, in Edwin Reardon the study of the creative artist oppressed by poverty bears the stamp of bitter experience. Of the other characters, pedantic Alfred Yule, the humble scholar Biffen, ambitious and worldly Jasper Milvain are still recognizable literary types. New Grub Street is a sombre and moving story, cynical in its conclusions, but deriving from its close observation and deep integrity a lasting importance for students of character and period.

This ambitious three-volume biography on Gissing examines both his life and writing both chronologically and in close detail. This final volume in Coustillas’s prodigious biography examines the turbulent last years of the author’s life and his literary afterlife.