APS TOGETHER
Day 37
New Grub Street by George GissingChapter 37
December 12, 2023 by Yiyun Li
“My dearest, you are a perfect woman, and poor Marian was only a clever school-girl.”
Amy and Jasper are rewarded in the end. Marian is relieved somewhat by her job in the library and the death of her father. Gissing was a most reliable realist. There is not a smudge of wishful thinking allowed anyone.
“Trust me, there’s many a man who would like to be generous, but is made despicably mean by necessity.”
Ah, necessity. Reminds me of Richard II’s lament:
Shows us but this: I am sworn brother, sweet,
To grim Necessity, and he and I
Will keep a league till death.
The novel begins with the Milvain siblings and their mother, with everyone’s future uncertain. And now it closes with the siblings, with their futures all set, with the dead and the abandoned strewn behind, real and metaphorical bodies on the battlefield of literature.
