George Gissing was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1857. A brilliant but solitary student, his prize-winning academic career was cut short when he stole money from fellow students in order to keep a young orphaned prostitute, Marianne (Nell) Harrison, from the streets. After a month of hard labour in Belle Vue Gaol, Manchester, he moved to the United States where he worked as both a teacher of classics in Massachusetts and later a travelling salesman's assistant in Chicago, the experience of which informed New Grub Street. Once back in London, Gissing worked as a tutor and writer. After two short and ill-fated marriages, first to Nell and then to the volatile and violent Edith Underwood, Gissing lived in France with the translator Gabrielle Fleury. By the end of the 1890s he had established a very strong literary reputation, and finally achieved financial security.
Gissing produced powerfully realistic novels that illumined the bleak life of the English underclass, the injustice of society and the plight of women. Often hailed as the greatest of the English realist novelists, Gissing had published over twenty books by the time of his death in the Pyrenees in 1903.
