ABSTRACT
But Woolf wrote at least four essays and reviews on Gissing; one of these, her 1927 review of the Gissing family letters, has been much reprinted. Other novelists who have written memorably about him include Arnold Bennett, George Orwell, William Plomer, V.S. Pritchett and Gillian Tindall. Not all these writers paid him the compliment of imitation, though some did. Among Gissing's critics it was Orwell (whose credentials as a novelist have been questioned nearly as often as Gissing's) who most clearly looked to him as a precursor. When Pritchett described Gissing as the 'perverse prophet and progenitor' of the new English novelists of the 1950s (Pritchett, p.63), it was, perhaps, Gissing's presence behind Orwell's direct influence that he was measuring. And this presence, as the centwy went on, became a penumbra rather than a shadow. Yet, as we shall see, Gissing's personal example, his presentation of the unclassed intellectual, and his realist aesthetic were not forgotten. At the same time, what had generated a tragic attitude in Gissing's best-known novels became a source of comedy and outright farce; and Gissing's contempt for the vulgarity of ordinary suburban life became transmuted into affection and even nostalgia.
