ABSTRACT
In his fiction, woman-worship has three main aspects - aesthetic, moral and intellectual. The first two are somewhat conventional; the third, more idiosyncratic. Aesthetically, Gissing's favoured women combine the stateliness and dignity in fashion at the end of the century with the delicacy and shrinkingness that were prized in earlier decades. A few touches establish his personal signature. Though theoretically he approved of female vigour, several of his heroines are frail and ailing, with the pallid beauty of Annabel in Thyrza, of which he writes, 'to the modern mind nothing is complete that has not an element of morbidity'. His women must also have beautiful voices - sweet, mellifluous, yet natural - which 'thrill' on the hearer's nerves. A foreign accent enhances the charm, for it adds an exotic piquancy. Not surprisingly his letters to Gabrielle are full of cadenzas of praise for her voice, which Roberts also appreciated.9 A final item in the captivating ensemble is - perhaps surprisingly - a grey dress, which seems to connote good taste and decorum, as well as practicality. Lady Revill in Sleeping Fires 'was so well dressed that Langley had no consciousness of what she wore, save that it shimmered pearly-grey'. Similarly, with Gabrielle, Gissing remembered 'the grey dress which you wore'. In The Crown of Life Irene Derwent is described as 'a grey figure affluent lines'. 10 The phrase is perhaps apter than Gissing intended, for aesthetically
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