APS TOGETHER
Day 18
New Grub Street by George GissingChapter 18
November 23, 2023 by Yiyun Li
“Like the majority of London people, she occupied a house of which the rent absurdly exceeded the due proportion of her income.”
Some things never change. A Tang Dynasty poet famously said that a metropolis never offered any ease for its dwellers.
“She did not aim at intimacy with her superiors; merely at superiority among her intimates.”
Gissing at his most succinct.
“Like her multitudinous kind, Mrs. Yule lived only in the opinions of other people.”
Mrs. Yule in an Austen or Eliot novel would be purely comical or inept or pitiful, but Gissing has made her real. He doesn’t sugarcoat her flaws.
