It was rumoured that Coustillas had despaired of ever producing anything that would do Gissing justice, or, alternatively, had produced a manuscript so long that nobody could afford to publish it. Meanwhile, the biography had entered into legend. The same remorseless high standards were applied to the 600-page George Gissing: A Definitive Bibliography (2005). Co-edited with the American scholars Paul F Matheisen and Arthur C Young as The Collected Letters of George Gissing, and with Coustillas doing most of the work, this appeared in nine fat volumes between 19.Īs with Gissing’s diaries, the editing was little short of fanatic: in one epic footnote Coustillas managed to track down an unrelated George J Gissing, some of whose post Gissing had mistakenly received while living at an address in Brixton. London and the Life of Literature in Late-Victorian England (1978), an edition of Gissing’s diaries, provided a portrait of the fin-de-siècle literary lifestyle was so uncompromising that one reviewer diagnosed a plot got up by the Society of Authors aimed at deterring new recruits to an over-populated trade.Ī two-volume life of Gissing had been announced in a Harvester Press catalogue in the early 1980s, but Coustillas had another quest in view: a scholarly edition of Gissing’s correspondence. Over the next decade, under the auspices of his Harvester Press imprint, Spiers, in collaboration with Coustillas, set about remedying this deficiency, reissuing 18 of the novels. It was not that the author of such late-Victorian classics as The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891) and The Odd Women (1893) was entirely forgotten – George Orwell had been a fan, and a pioneering biography by Jakob Korg had appeared in 1962 – merely that so many of his books were out of print. The origins of the Gissing project dated to 1968 when John Spiers, a PhD student and fledgling publisher at the recently established University of Sussex (“a new institution with a lot of money but an empty library,” Spiers remembered) invited Coustillas to prepare a scholarly edition of the “impossibly scarce” two-volume Isabel Clarendon (1886), a Gissing work so neglected by posterity that it was thought only six copies had survived a fire at the original publisher’s warehouse.Īt this point Gissing studies were at a low ebb. Vividly describes the poverty in this part of north London. George Gissing’s 1889 novel, The Nether World, Peter’s Lane, in Clerkenwell, painted by John Crowther in 1880.
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