Reading and Misreading the Country House in the Novels of George Gissing: The Dangers of Fiction

• Published in: English literature in transition, 1880-1920 1880-1920, 2017-01, Vol.60 (3), p.341-358
• Main Author: Hutcheon, Rebecca
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Culture; Fiction; Nobility; Novels; Perceptions; Reading; Working class
• ISSN: 0013-8339; 1559-2715

[...]this discussion seeks to identify the signs in this early novel that establish explicitly and unwittingly an alternative and extrapolative pattern in Gissing's works. [...]deciphering the perceived simplicity of the romance and idealisms of Isabel Clarendon as intentional and self-conscious intimates an entirely different view of the upper-class setting. [...]the lexical field in the description of Isabel-"impulsive"; "absence," and, later, "restlessness"; "flippancy"-denotes Kingcote's sudden realisation of her uncertainty, transition, and volatility and reveals how Isabel is transformed by the city. [...]prognostic of Peak, Kingcote pursues an idealisation that the book proves to be false-Isabel is more complicated and vulnerable than Kingcote can recognise. similarly, the capacious yet deceptive country house setting of Isabel Clarendon looks towards Rivenoak of Our Friend the Charlatan (1901) whose aging owner Lady Ogram, like Isabel, is aristocratic by marriage rather than by birth. [...]Gissing's treatment of the country house and its demonstration of seemingly commonplace nostalgia is not a mere transplantation of the Gaussens into fiction, valued only for "light ... shed on the manifold connections between his life and work" (which is Halperin's judgement of it).54 In fact, the book displays a marked caution against approaching places and lives with these kinds of rehearsed expectations (biographical, social, or literary) and instead suggests that "real" places, like real "people" are unidentifiable and multitudinous, and cannot be "gather[ed] ... and round[ed] up" precisely into one fixed discourse.