The sensuous and the emotional sides of his experience
are blended with the most subtle artistry in his _By the Ionian Sea_, a
short volume of impressions, unsurpassable in its kind, from which we
cannot refrain two characteristic extracts:--
[Footnote 20: _The Odd Women_ (1893, new edition, 1894) is a rather sordid
and depressing survey of the life-histories of certain orphaned daughters
of a typical Gissing doctor--grave, benign, amiably diffident, terribly
afraid of life. 'From the contact of coarse actualities his nature shrank.'
After his death one daughter, a fancy-goods shop assistant (no wages), is
carried off by consumption; a second drowns herself in a bath at a
charitable institution; another takes to drink; and the portraits of the
survivors, their petty, incurable maladies, their utter uselessness, their
round shoulders and 'very short legs,' pimples, and scraggy necks--are as
implacable and unsparing as a Maupassant could wish. From the deplorable
insight with which he describes the nerveless, underfed, compulsory
optimism of these poor in spirit and poor in hope Gissing might almost have
been an 'odd woman' himself. In this book and _The Paying Guest_ (1895) he
seemed to take a savage delight in depicting the small, stiff, isolated,
costly, unsatisfied pretentiousness and plentiful lack of imagination which
cripples suburbia so cruelly.
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