LADY ON THE WEB

Having finished Will Warburton (a corking good read, with good sense triumphant), am now halfway through Gissing's By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy, in a late-1920s edition. It's a slim volume indeed, with letterpress type which pleases me. There is a good deal of geographical description of no particular interest, though it intrigues me to hear about the agave plants and giant cactus apparently prevalent in Southern Italy.

The most engaging part so far is when poor George falls terribly ill of "fever" (malaria, one assumes) and describes the pathetic excuse for tea which has apparently been reposing in the local apothecary, as a sort of anthropological curiosity, for many years. His description of this near-flavorless dust is a scream, pure Gissing in its ironic and highly specific disgust.

Having now finished reading all of Gissing's major fiction, I have ordered the following two volumes from the local library:

Commonplace Book: A Manuscript in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, edited by Jacob Korg. Published 1962, 69 pp.
Had I been interested in Mr Gissing when I lived in Manhattan, I suppose I could have viewed this manuscript of his "daily book" in person, in the original.

George Gissing and H.G. Wells, Their Friendship and Correspondence, edited and with an introduction by Royal A. Gettmann. Published 1961, 285 pp.
H.G. Wells (1866-1946) survived Gissing by 43 years. It would have been fascinating to see what Gissing might have become, had he lived as long as, or longer than, his better-known friend.