George Gissing’s eighth novel, The Emancipated, is moderately entertaining, but I recommend it only to Gissing fans.  There are too many characters, the whole book briefly disintegrates in the middle, and though Gissing gets a second wind I couldn’t decide whether I liked this or not.

Still, there are pleasures to reading The Emancipated. The gist of the novel: a group of English travelers get acquainted in Italy.  It is a precursor of E. M. Forster’s much sleeker A Room with a View. The characters chat, visit churches, and sight-see: “If only,” I mourned, “I could remember who Mrs. Lessingham and Mrs. Spence are!”  (A month after reading this, I discovered that the minor characters had made no impression on me.)

 Gissing examines the tension between sex and religion, free will and conformity. There is much off-stage sex and repressed sex in this novel.  All the men, including Ross Mallard, an artist and the guardian of the heiress, Cecily Doran, are infatuated with 18-year-old Cecily, a radiant, intelligent young woman who doesn’t yet know the power of her sex.  

Of course, her female fellow travelers are less indulgent.  And I admit, I am not a big Cecily fan.  She reminds me of the irritatingly too-lively Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.  But Cecily’s presence gives Gissing a chance to poke holes in the marriage plot and skewer the institution of marriage.  It is unfortunate, to say the least, that Cecily falls in love with Reuben Elgar, an aspiring artist/writer and a fortune hunter.

I prefer the much less likable Miriam Baske, a wealthy, devout Christian widow who slowly blooms in the beauty of Italy.  At the beginning of the novel, she is off-puttingly religious: she spends her leisure drawing plans for a new church she has promised to finance for a conservative religious sect.  Her passion for drawing plans is reminiscent of Dorothea Brooke’s favorite pasttime in Middlemarch: Dorothea draws plans for houses for the poor until she marries Casaubon, who already has built good houses for the poor.  

Italy softens Miriam up. She sheds her rigid Puritanism, influenced by the beauty of the landscape, the art, and her friendship with Ross Mallard.  She becomes emancipated from her blind acceptance of religion. She compares herself to Cecily, who seems to have been born emancipated.

And though she doesn’t care for Cecily, she works with Mallard to prevent Elgar, Miriam’s libertine brother, from pursuing the inexperienced Cecily.  Mallard invites Elgar, a pseudo-artist, to travel with him and paint, but Elgar soon heads back to Cecily in Naples. Miriam considers Elgar immoral, but has no influence on him.  And later in the novel, she becomes jealous of Cecily, due to a misunderstanding, while poor Cecily learns the meaning of a dead marriage.

This is a character-driven novel, but it is also a rant against religion and marriage. You can feel the steam coming out of Gissing’s head.   If you have not read two or three of Gissing’s masterpieces, among them The Odd Women, New Grub Street, and The Nether World, don’t even think of reading The Emancipated. I haven’t read all of his work, but it is safe to say that this one is forgettable.