Just wanted to recommend this highly underrated late Victorian novelist. As a massive Orwell fan, I've been reading Gissing's New Grub Street based on Orwell's recommendation: "England has produced very few better novelists".
I think Gissing's style (New Grub Street is gritty realism at its best, looking at the struggles and poverty behind the London publishing and writing circle of the time) is ahead of its time, a precursor to the sort of social commentary we see in George Orwell's books a few decades later.
Anyway - just wondered if other people had read the book and enjoyed it as much as me!
LittlemissKM
