The Woman Question and George Gissing
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The novels of George Gissing, dealing prominently with “the Woman Question” in England near the end of the nineteenth century, portray women of three basic types: the womanly woman, the woman in revolt, and the new woman. These types go hand in hand with the women on many social levels in a rigidly class-conscious society who work for a living. The novels reveal also, in dialogue rather than diatribe, Gissing’s shifting position in regard to the woman question. Rather than presenting propaganda that professed to solve the woman question, his novels defined it in the lives of individual women, raising in the minds of his readers the significant issues on which any solution had to rest.
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About the Book
Even though his books never sold as well as those of more popular novelists, women in particular liked George Gissing’s work and often wrote to him for advice. They could see he was keenly interested in the lives of women and the long struggle to improve their condition in a gender-restrictive society dominated by males. Though Gissing tried to champion the women’s cause, he did not entirely succeed. Perhaps he was too close to the changes affecting women to understand their situation fully. Perhaps with individual women a tenacious idealism blurred his vision. Perhaps the facts of his life and experience prevented a balanced judgment. Yet if he could say at the end of his career that he knew nothing at all about women, it was not because he had failed to write about them or to make a thorough study of them. Gissing used the woman question of his day to create female characters as much alive now as when he first began to write.
About the Author
After duty in the Air Force and graduate studies at Baylor University and the University of California at Los Angeles, James Haydock earned a PhD in English language and literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In the years that followed, he researched, wrote about, and taught every aspect of Victorian literature. While teaching the novel year after year, he began to write novels of his own. His publications are almost equally divided between academic works and historical fiction. Now retired, he lives with his wife in Wisconsin.