George Gissing | Thornfield Hall

It used to be a Herculean task to find George Gissing’s books. After reading Gail Godwin’s brilliant novel, The Odd Woman, with its many allusions to George Gissing, I tracked down a paperback copy of his novel The Odd Women at a literary hub of a bookshop that had almost anything you could want.

My favorite of his books is New Grub Street, but I recently reread Gissing’s quasi-feminist novel, In the Year of Jubilee, an uneven but delightful book that is in part an exposé of women’s education. Gissing focuses on on the consequences of the inadequate education of Victorian women.

The four main characters are “New Women,” who want to break out of the mold of Victorian womanhood. None of them are well-educated, though all have gone to girls’ schools.

At the center is 23-year-old Nancy Lord, the wealthiest and best-educated of the lot. Nancy is complacent about her education but struggles when she attempts to read books about the sciences. And then she meets attractive, sardonic Lionel Tarrant, a clever young man educated at Oxford. (Too clever? Kind of a swine, I thought!) Whether consciously or not, she sees a relationship with him as a way to escape the trap of Victorian womanhood. And yet, because Tarrant does not regard her as an equal, this mutual attraction proves disastrous.

Nancy wants to enjoy the same freedom her brother has, and near the beginning of the book, the Jubilee – the celebration of the 50th year of Queen Victoria’s reign – gives her an excuse to go out at night. Nancy is exhilarated by the crowd, and slips away from her chaperone (a business associate of her father’s) for an illicit meeting with a male friend who takes her out for a drink. Nancy would love to live freely like a man.

Her friends are also New Women, to a greater or lesser extent. Some achieve their goals, some do not. Beatrice French is the most successful. She brilliantly founds a women’s club that sells cheaply-made, ostensibly fashionable clothing to lower-middle-class women. Her younger sister, Fanny, is too flighty for business, and actively pursues free love. (Hippie or slut? Well, everyone thinks she is a slut!)

And then there’s Jessica, who is determined to take the baccalaureate exams at the University of London. Jessica is a fascinating character, a true bluestocking who at first strikes this reader as an intellectual. She and Nancy knew each other at school, and often have tea together. Jessica works part-time as a governess, but devotes the rest of her time to studying. She cannot understand the math and science. It isn’t a matter of intelligence: she simply does not have the background. (Jessica the Obscure?)

As the time draws nearer to her exams, she becomes fearful and convinced she will fail. And tragically she does fail, and has a nervous breakdown from which she never recovers. If she had attended a good school, rather than a finishing school, would she have passed the exams? I think so! But of course her parents did their best: they thought they were sending their daughter to a good school. But Jessica’s fall is tragic. She had so much potential, and was such a kind young woman, and now she is permanently befuddled, spiteful, and jealous.

Class matters The characters are all more or less middle-class, ranging from lower-middle-class (Jessica) to more prosperous middle-class (Beatrice and Fanny French) to a sort of wealthy business class that is not considered quite top-notch (Nancy). Oddly, It is the middle-middle-class women, Beatrice and Fanny, who have the most freedom. Beatrice is a successful businesswoman, and Fanny happily pursues her sexual relationships with men.

This novel does veer toward the melodramatic: there is a secret marriage, a mysterious rich aunt, and even a Tess of the D’Urbervilles vibe. In my opinion, Gissing makes a wrong turn near the end of the novel. He believes in free love, but apparently not for women.

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.