«En este feliz país nuestro hay medio millón más de mujeres que de hombres. [...] Tantas mujeres solteras para las que no existe posibilidad de pareja. Los pesimistas las llaman vidas inútiles, perdidas y vanas. Ni que decir tiene que yo, como parte integrante de ese grupo, no pienso así.»Estas palabras de Rhoda Nunn, la heroína de Mujeres singulares (1893), que trabaja para «endurecer el corazón de las mujeres» y es un modelo de independencia para ellas, introducen acertadamente el problemático ambiente de esta novela, en la que el proyecto de emancipación feminista, en lo económico y en lo intelectual, se entrelaza con una ilustración profunda y acerada de los avatares del «corazón» comprometido en estas causas.

Tapa blanda

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Alba Editorial

Alba

Mujeres singulares

Cuarenta años después de Murger, George Gissing despojó de romanticismo a la bohemia y escribió uno de los retratos más graves y realistas de la fatalidad de la bohemia entrelazando el destino de dos parejas, los fracasos de una y los ascensos de la otra, el ansia de enriquecimiento de ambas, su trágico destino, la muerte, la pobreza y la infelicidad que los envuelve.

La nueva grub street

Jasper is attracted to Marian, who loves him passionately, but he proposes to her only when she inherits a legacy of #5000. When the legacy does not materialise Jasper withdraws. Instead he marries Amy Reardon, the young widow of the writer Edwin Reardon. Edwin is the author of two fine works, but his poverty-stricken existence, his lack of public recognition and his wife's desertion eventualyy drive him to an early grave, in stark and bitter contrast to Jasper's success which comes as a triumph of self-advertisement over artistic conscience.

Everyman Library

New grub street

The Nether World (1889) is generally regarded as the finest of Gissing's early novels. A fast moving story of highly dramatic, sometimes violent scenes, it depicts life amongst the artisans, factory-girls, and slum-dwellers of Clerkenwell in the 1870s. But this is not just a novel of documentary realism. It is one man's mordant vision - shaped by bitter personal experience of poverty - of the quality of life endured by a variety of characters in the nether world. With Zolaesque intensity and relentlessness, Gissing lays bare the economic forces which determine the aspirations and expectations of those born to a life of labour. This is a tale of intrigue, as rapacious schemers try to wrest a fortune out of a mysterious old man who has returned to their midst, and of thwarted love. There is no sentimentality. This is a world in which the strong exercise power against their own kind, scheming and struggling for survival, a world from which, Gissing bleakly maintains, there can be no escape.

Mujeres singulares (2021)

La nueva grub street

New grub street

The Nether World