21 h 14 minAudiobook14 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 21 h 14 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What happens when a writer's standards cannot pay the rent?
In the London of the 1880s, writing is a trade, and talent offers no promise of security. Edwin Reardon cannot write to order. As his income shrinks, he and his wife, Amy, move into smaller rooms and count each shilling. Their marriage comes under the same pressure as his work.
Jasper Milvain takes another path: he courts editors, promotes his name, and writes to please the market. Around them, George Gissing brings together scholars, journalists, and novelists caught between ambition and need. New Grub Street asks what remains of art, love, and loyalty when almost every choice depends on money.
What you’ll discover
- Two ways to write Follow Reardon and Milvain as literary standards meet the demands of earning a living.
- A marriage under pressure See how dwindling money strains Edwin and Amy's hopes for a secure life together.
- Lives behind the pages Enter reading rooms, newspaper offices, and cheap lodgings where writers struggle to keep working.
- The cost of conviction Meet Harold Biffen, whose loyalty to ordinary life shapes his strict idea of fiction.
- Learning without reward Encounter Alfred Yule's bitterness and Marian's quiet longing for a life of her own.
Who will love it
This book suits you if you enjoy Victorian novels about money, marriage and ambition, or stories of writers, editors and publishers, and if you like characters who argue about what a good life costs.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Writing is a way to survive
- Jasper makes ambition sound reasonable
- A blank page divides a marriage
- Integrity does not guarantee an audience
- Marian finds warmth beyond her home
- Steady wages expose a deeper divide
- An inheritance gives ambition new room
- Love must answer to money
- Money shapes work and love
Who’s who
- Jasper MilvainA clever young journalist who sees writing as a trade and is determined to make a name and a good income.
- Edwin ReardonA sensitive novelist whose gift fades under the strain of poverty and a failing marriage, though he clings to his ideals.
- Amy ReardonReardon's beautiful, practical wife, who wants social standing and has little patience for a husband who cannot earn.
- Marian YuleA quiet, thoughtful young woman who works in the Reading Room helping her father and longs for love and a life of her own.
- Alfred YuleMarian's father, a learned, embittered critic who is ruled by old quarrels and hungers for an editor's chair.
- Harold BiffenReardon's loyal, poor friend, a tutor who writes a plain novel of ordinary life and asks nothing from the world.
- Maud MilvainJasper's proud, handsome sister, who wants to move into polite society and does not hide her scorn for poverty.
- WhelpdaleA good-natured, flattering friend who sells literary advice and looks for a wife and a successful scheme.
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New Grub Street in 25 languages, side by side, paragraph by paragraph, once the book texts are online: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
New Grub Street
by George Gissing · 1891
Jasper Milvain treats writing as a trade, while his friend Reardon struggles to earn a living from his novels in London.
Challenging10–20 hours to read2 languages
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In short
A man is being hanged in London this morning, says Jasper Milvain as he cracks his breakfast egg in a quiet country village. He finds comfort in the thought, because things are bad for him, but not that bad.
New Grub Street at a glance
- Reading time
- About 12 h 15 min9 h 45 min fast, 14 h 35 min slow
- Length
- 175,100 words
- Library level
- Challenging long sentences, a rich vocabulary
- First published
- 1891by George Gissing
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). How long the classics take to read · Updated
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Jasper Milvain treats literature as a trade
The novel opens in the village of Finden, where Jasper is staying with his mother and sisters. He is twenty-five, neat and very sure of himself. He reads a letter from his friend Reardon and judges it coldly. Reardon is the old impractical artist, he says, while he himself is the literary man of 1882.
Jasper explains his creed to anyone who will listen. A writer is a skilled tradesman who watches the market and sells the same work many times. His sister Maud calls this ignoble, yet she knows their mother lives on a small annuity, and Jasper has come to ask for more of it.
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- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas of the whole book in about 14 minutes. A good first look, or a refresher.
Details
- First published
- 1891
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 13 h 50 min
- Level
- Challenging
Cite this edition
Gissing, George. New Grub Street. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/new-grub-street.
Gissing, G. (2026). New Grub Street. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/new-grub-street (Original work published 1891)
Gissing, George. New Grub Street. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/new-grub-street.
@book{gissing2026new,
author = {Gissing, George},
title = {New Grub Street},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/new-grub-street},
note = {First published 1891}
}
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What is New Grub Street about?
It follows several London writers in the early 1880s, showing how money, publishers and reviewers shape their work and marriages. Jasper Milvain succeeds by treating writing as business, while Edwin Reardon and Harold Biffen struggle to keep to their ideals.
What does the title New Grub Street mean?
Grub Street was the old London street linked with poor hack writers. Gissing adds new to suggest that the same hunger for pay now runs through a modern, bigger and faster literary trade of papers, magazines and circulating libraries.
Who is Jasper Milvain and what does he want?
Jasper is a young journalist who believes literature is a trade and that success comes from knowing the market and making friends. He wants a thousand pounds a year and a wife with money, and he is open about it.
The author
George Gissing
1857–1903 · English novelist
George Gissing was an English novelist born in Wakefield in 1857. He lived in London and later in France, where he died in 1903. He wrote New Grub Street, published in 1891, The Odd Women, published in 1893, and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, published in 1903.
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