Of the writers you’ve never heard of, George Gissing may be the best. His prose is beautiful, and his plotlines are exquisitely painful.

But beyond the sheer artistry of his writing, he has much to teach the modern reader, both in his writing and through the tragedy of his life.

Gissing’s academic career began with great success. At age 15, Gissing sat for an English and Latin exam at a prestigious European university, winning the highest score in England for both subjects. It was an achievement never before accomplished.A month later, Gissing won the Owens College Shakespeare scholarship. He dreamed of becoming a professor of the classics, and he appeared to be well on his way.

Events took a drastic turn, though, when he fell in love with a prostitute named Nell Harrison. Gissing began to steal from his classmates as a means of supporting her addictions. He was caught, expelled from school, and exiled to the United States.

The good news is that, while living alone and hungry in Chicago, Gissing became a writer. “Within a week of his arrival in Chicago,” biographer Paul Delaney writes, “Gissing was a published author and had eighteen dollars in hand, enough to live on for another month.”

From his earliest newspaper short stories, Gissing became a remarkably powerful wordsmith. The first of his books that I read (I’ve since read them all—a few of them several times) happened to be his masterpiece, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. The book alternately moved me to tears of despair and outbursts of laughter—often within a matter of a few paragraphs.

George Orwell, author of the well-known Animal Farm, believed Gissing was “perhaps the best novelist England has produced.” According to Orwell, “We must be thankful for the piece of youthful folly which turned him aside from a comfortable middle-class career and forced him to become the chronicler of vulgarity, squalor, and failure.”

While Gissing’s doomed characters and their grim surroundings might strike the uninitiated as depressing, the eloquence of his prose borders on sorcery, and its beauty provides a salve that tempers the anguish:

It must be confessed that the majority do not seem unhappy; they jest with each other amid their squalor; they have an evident pleasure in buying and selling; they would be surprised if they knew you pitied them. And the very fact that they are unconscious of their degradation afflicts one with all the keener pity.

Still, readers might wonder: What is the relevance of a writer who died more than a century ago? Or, to put it more bluntly, why should we care about George Gissing? 

For starters, Gissing has never been given his due. One could argue—and I will—that Gissing’s work is superior to that of, say, Charles Dickens and H.G. Wells, despite the fact that Gissing never achieved their level of monetary or critical success. Sorrow and hopelessness—the primary ingredients of Gissing’s fiction—are not rabidly consumed by the masses.

Beyond this, the soaring prose of George Gissing reminds us that truly excellent writers are a rare breed. In an age in which everybody is—or thinks they are—a writer, Gissing’s talent tempers our confidence. As William F. Buckley Jr. wrote, it’s unclear “whether it is sufficiently recognized that writing is … an art.” Contrary to popular opinion, excellent prose is often the product of deep commitment and struggle; rarely does it come naturally.

Gissing, then, can inspire us toward a deeper appreciation of literature, an appreciation that Gissing embodied. He wrote:

The world of the Greeks and the Romans is my land of romance; a quotation in either language thrills me strangely, and there are passages of Greek and Latin verse which I cannot read without a dimming of the eyes, which I cannot repeat aloud because my voice fails me.

Gissing’s writing affects me in a similar fashion. It’s not an exaggeration to say that his work altered the trajectory of my life. After I read him, I began to take writing seriously. I landed a gig writing columns for the local paper, and I wrote book reviews, personal essays, and even penned a novel as a direct result of Gissing’s inspiration.

The fact that Gissing, despite his uncanny ability, nearly starved to death in his lifetime, and languishes in obscurity today, is a stinging indictment of ephemeral culture and the trivialities we deem worthy of our attention. Gissing’s works opened my eyes to the power of the written word and set my sights on the profound things that literature can examine—and I hope he will inspire you in the same way.

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Image credit: Public domain