Great Short Novels of Henry James

Maurice, a novel written in 1913 -14 and based on his own intensely private homosexual life, was published posthumously in 1971. George Robert Gissing (1857–1903) While a student at Owens College in Manchester, Gissing became infatuated with a young prostitute, and in his efforts to help her committed some thefts for which he was expelled and sent to prison. After working briefly as a journalist in the United States and experiencing great poverty and hardship, he returned to England and while sustaining himself as a clerk began to write novels. A small legacy enabled him to complete his first published novel, Workers in the Dawn (1880). For the next twenty years, Gissing published nearly a novel a year, achieving limited commercial success but earning the respect of fellow writers like Henry James and H. G. Wells. Reflecting his years of economic struggle, Gissing's novels such as The Nether World (1889) and Born in Exile (1892) evoke the oppressiveness of nineteenth-century urban life among the English working class ...»