ABSTRACT
What kind of man, one wonders, did Gissing expect? Quite possibly a more
self-regarding, combative, self-important figure than the man who greeted him at
Aldeburgh; the embattled author, certainly, of the phenomenally successful novel
The Woman Who Did which had been published that February and which Allen told Gissing was currently earning him £25 per week.2 This succès de scandale and Allen’s high-profile involvement in the aftermath of its publication, offered the only
possible conversational topic to rival inevitable ruminations over the sentence of
Oscar Wilde the Saturday before.3
