ABSTRACT
The suburbs owe a debt to Mr George Gissing, who has vindicated them triumphantly in his latest novel from the cheap sneers of the superior modern journalist. For although the life which he describes in his usual uncompromising fashion is generally unlovely and often hideous, it is full of human interest, and rises at times to a genuinely tragic level. In the Year ofJubilee-the title is solely derived from the date at which the story begins-is a plain, unvarnished tale of middleclass life, in which the modern spirit of revolt is illustrated in half a dozen different types. Nothing, at first sight, could be more unpromising than the materials selected; none the less the book is of absorbing interest, and-with the exception of the sole personage who does not belong to the bourgeois stratum, Lionel Tarrant, whose preposterous views on the married state are developed with fatiguing iterationsingularly convincing in its presentment ofhuman nature. Apart from the somewhat shadowy figure ofthe faithful domestic servant, the only character which makes any real or successful appeal to the sympathies of the reader is that of the heroine, whom, in spite of her hasty selfsurrender, and of her acquiescence in a long course of systematic deception, it is impossible to help respecting for her unBinching
