ABSTRACT
The main problem with the disproportionate significance attributed to Ryecroft within George Gissing's oeuvre and the assumption of autobiography in relation to place is the uncritical reading it entails: Ryecroft's views are seen as substitutes for Gissing's own conclusions on the themes and settings of his works. Through the presentation of the country cottage with its untamed garden amid a picturesque landscape matched with the motionlessness and quietness of life, the preface introduces the setting as a realisation of the English rural ideal. The overtly self-satisfied tone of Ryecroft diverges from earlier portrayals of similar settings. In novels such as Isabel Clarendon and Born in Exile, the anxiety of connectedness with the world without rapidly disrupts the southern countryside milieu, and the idyll is deemed unstable and unattainable. Discussing the innate irony of the rural in Ryecroft, both Frye and Kevin Swanford identify memory and the persistence of time as the terms of its denial.
