New Grub Street by George Gissing (best mobile ebook reader .txt) 📕
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Grub Street is the name of a former street in London synonymous with pulp writers and low-quality publishers. New Grub Street takes its name from that old street, as it follows the lives and endeavors of a group of writers active in the literary scene of 1880s London.
Edwin Reardon is a quiet and intelligent writer whose artistic sensibilities are the opposite of what the London public wants to read. He’s forced to write long, joyless novels that he thinks pop publishers will want to buy. These novels are draining to write, yet result in meager sales; soon Edwin’s increasingly small bank account, and his stubborn pride, start to put a strain on his once-happy marriage.
His best friend, Biffen, lies to one side of Edwin’s nature: as another highly-educated writer, he accepts a dingy, lonely, and hungry life of abject poverty in exchange for being able to produce a novel that’s true to his artistic desires but is unlikely to sell. On the other side lies Jasper Milvain, an “alarmingly modern” writer laser-focused on earning as much money as possible no matter what he’s made to write, as he floats through the same literary circles that Edwin haunts.
The intricately-told tale follows these writers as their differing outlooks and their fluctuating ranks in society affect them and the people around them. Gissing, himself a prolific writer intimately familiar with the London literary scene, draws from his own life in laying out the characters and events in the novel. He carefully elaborates the fragile social fabric of the literary world, its paupers and its barons both equal in the industry but unequal in public life. Though the novel is about writers on the face, the deep thread that runs through it all is the brutality of the modern social structure, where the greedy and superficial are rewarded with stability and riches, while the delicate and thoughtful are condemned to live on the margins of respectable society in grimy poverty, robbed not only of dignity, but of love.
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- Author: George Gissing
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“Changed?—Yes, that is true, I am afraid. But how do you think this change will affect my behaviour to you?”
“Remember how you have been speaking to me.”
“And you think I should treat you brutally if you came into my power?”
“Not brutally, in the ordinary sense of the word. But with faults of temper which I couldn’t bear. I have my own faults. I can’t behave as meekly as some women can.”
It was a small concession, but Reardon made much of it.
“Did my faults of temper give you any trouble during the first year of our married life?” he asked gently.
“No,” she admitted.
“They began to afflict you when I was so hard driven by difficulties that I needed all your sympathy, all your forbearance. Did I receive much of either from you, Amy?”
“I think you did—until you demanded impossible things of me.”
“It was always in your power to rule me. What pained me worst, and hardened me against you, was that I saw you didn’t care to exert your influence. There was never a time when I could have resisted a word of yours spoken out of your love for me. But even then, I am afraid, you no longer loved me, and now—”
He broke off, and stood watching her face.
“Have you any love for me left?” burst from his lips, as if the words all but choked him in the utterance.
Amy tried to shape some evasive answer, but could say nothing.
“Is there ever so small a hope that I might win some love from you again?”
“If you wish me to come and live with you when you go to Croydon I will do so.”
“But that is not answering me, Amy.”
“It’s all I can say.”
“Then you mean that you would sacrifice yourself out of—what? Out of pity for me, let us say.”
“Do you wish to see Willie?” asked Amy, instead of replying.
“No. It is you I have come to see. The child is nothing to me, compared with you. It is you, who loved me, who became my wife—you only I care about. Tell me you will try to be as you used to be. Give me only that hope, Amy; I will ask nothing except that, now.”
“I can’t say anything except that I will come to Croydon if you wish it.”
“And reproach me always because you have to live in such a place, away from your friends, without a hope of the social success which was your dearest ambition?”
Her practical denial that she loved him wrung this taunt from his anguished heart. He repented the words as soon as they were spoken.
“What is the good?” exclaimed Amy in irritation, rising and moving away from him. “How can I pretend that I look forward to such a life with any hope?”
He stood in mute misery, inwardly cursing himself and his fate.
“I have said I will come,” she continued, her voice shaken with nervous tension. “Ask me or not, as you please, when you are ready to go there. I can’t talk about it.”
“I shall not ask you,” he replied. “I will have no woman slave dragging out a weary life with me. Either you are my willing wife, or you are nothing to me.”
“I am married to you, and that can’t be undone. I repeat that I shan’t refuse to obey you. I shall say no more.”
She moved to a distance, and there seated herself, half turned from him.
“I shall never ask you to come,” said Reardon, breaking a short silence. “If our married life is ever to begin again it must be of your seeking. Come to me of your own will, and I shall never reject you. But I will die in utter loneliness rather than ask you again.”
He lingered a few moments, watching her; she did not move. Then he took his hat, went in silence from the room, and left the house.
It rained harder than before. As no trains were running at this hour, he walked in the direction where he would be likely to meet with an omnibus. But it was a long time before one passed which was any use to him. When he reached home he was in cheerless plight enough; to make things pleasanter, one of his boots had let in water abundantly.
“The first sore throat of the season, no doubt,” he muttered to himself.
Nor was he disappointed. By Tuesday the cold had firm grip of him. A day or two of influenza or sore throat always made him so weak that with difficulty he supported the least physical exertion; but at present he must go to his work at the hospital. Why stay at home? To what purpose spare himself? It was not as if life had any promise for him. He was a machine for earning so much money a week, and would at least give faithful work for his wages until the day of final breakdown.
But, midway in the week, Carter discovered how ill his clerk was.
“You ought to be in bed, my dear fellow, with gruel and mustard plasters and all the rest of it. Go home and take care of yourself—I insist upon it.”
Before leaving the office, Reardon wrote a few lines to Biffen, whom he had visited on the Monday. “Come and see me if you can. I am down with a bad cold, and have to keep in for the rest of the week. All the same, I feel far more cheerful. Bring a new chapter of your exhilarating romance.”
XXVI Married Woman’s PropertyOn her return from church that Sunday Mrs. Edmund Yule was anxious to learn the result of the meeting between Amy and her husband. She hoped fervently that Amy’s anomalous position would come to an end now that Reardon had the offer of something better than a mere clerkship. John Yule never ceased to grumble at his sister’s
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