Book description
'If only I had the skill, I would produce novels out-trashing the
trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies'
In New Grub Street George Gissing re-created a microcosm of London's
literary society as he had experienced it. His novel is at once a
major social document and a story that draws us irresistibly into the
twilit world of Edwin Reardon, a struggling novelist, and his friends
and acquaintances in Grub Street including Jasper Milvain, an
ambitious journalist, and Alfred Yule, an embittered critic. Here
Gissing brings to life the bitter battles (fought out in obscure
garrets or in the Reading Room of the British Museum) between
integrity and the dictates of the market place, the miseries of
genteel poverty and the damage that failure and hardship do to human
personality and relationships.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in
English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the
beginning of the First World War.
