I did not know of this late 19th century British author before I started recording for this project. Though priding myself on having read a lot of the English literary classics from 18th century to early modern era, I've been finding out, to my amazement, the names of so many writers whom I've never heard of, simply by randomly browsing the free (no longer copyrighted) titles available on Project Gutenberg. Like so many men and women of letters in various time and various quarters of the globe who have been overshadowed by their greater contemporaries, Gissing in his brief existence left a considerable literary production. Whether his novels have any significant worth in the opinion of literary critics, they provide a window onto the life and preoccupations of the people of his time, which though very unlike our own, we can still thoroughly enter into on the basis of our shared human experience.
