LADY ON THE WEB

Having finished Gissing's sixth novel, A Life's Morning, I am now engaged upon his seventh, The Nether World. Before I enter into a comment or two on Nether, a comment on Morning is in order.

I had said I would not read the Morley Roberts introduction, but, led by curiosity, I did -- after I had finished the book. I had noticed something curious about the ending -- foreshadowing which, having come to nothing, yet hung in the air. Roberts confirmed this by revealing that the publishers had forced Gissing to alter the original tragic ending to a "happy" one. Driven by poverty, he had no real choice but to accept, and thus mar his work.

So far, The Nether World is not up to the mark of his better efforts. Authorial intrusion is overdone, standing as a warning to those who would rather write diaries than novels. But the picture of late-Victorian London it conjures is, as always, specific enough in its details to be fascinating to the social scholar.