Books and Manuscripts

"I'm afraid that I can give you very little information about George Gissing."

London, Oct(ober) 10, 1932. One sheet, 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in. (209 x 133 mm). Typed letter, on green 52, Tavistock Square stationery, signed by Woolf, to a Miss Middlebrook, apologizing for her inability to provide helpful information regarding English novelist George Gissing for a book Middlebrook was intending to write about him: "I am afraid that I can give you very little information about George Gissing. I never knew him; my estimate,/expressed in my introduction, is/therefore solely of his work. I believe that Mr. Morely Roberts was a great/friend of his; and is still alive. But/I do not know where, or if he would be willing to give you information. I do not know if any members of his family, save the son, are still alive. My impression is that Gissing lived a good deal shut off from literary society, and was not associated with any group. Except for Mr Wells I have never met anyone who knew him. It is difficult to express any opinion as to whether your (sic) the book you describe is possible. I gather that you wish to deal with his private life, and if so, since he was unfortunate, I believe in his marriage, and other relations no doubt it would be best to consult his son. If you are only dealing with his work, of course he is an interesting writer, and should make a good subject for criticism. I am sorry to be so little help. Yours sincerely Virginia Woolf". Three MS. corrections by Woolf. Mounted to larger folding sheet excised from a book; creasing from contemporary folds.

Great English modernist Virginia Woolf responds to an inquiring author about English novelist George Gissing a few months prior to Woolf's public squabble with Gissing's son.

Woolf engaged with the writing of George Gissing from the very start of her career as a writer, and wrote four essays on his work in her lifetime: first, a review on Gissing's The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft in the Anglo-Catholic journal, the Guardian on February 13, 1907; the second, a review on various works by him, in the Times Literary Supplement in 1912; the third, the essay "An Impression of Gissing," featured in the New Statesmen on June 30, 1923; and the fourth, the essay "The Letters of George Gissing to Members of His Family," in the Nation and Athenaeum, on February 26, 1927.

It was during the time of this letter that Woolf was negotiating with London publisher Jonathan Cape to have her fourth essay on Gissing be used as the introduction to a reprint of Gissing's By the Ionian Sea (Cape, 1933). It was not the first time this essay was used to introduce a Gissing work, as a slightly edited version of it was used by Cape three years earlier in the publication of Gissing's Selection Autobiographical and Imaginative (Cape, 1929). Its inclusion this time though would prove problematic for both Woolf and Cape.

Gissing's son, Alfred Gissing, whom Woolf recommends to Middlebrook in this letter, had read Woolf's fourth essay on his father when it was reprinted in the New Republic in 1927, and had disapproved of it for factual inaccuracies concerning the details of his and his father's life. As literary scholar Pierre Coustillas recounts about the matter, "Alfred Gissing read it and, understandably, found it inadequate. He said so to its author. 'I have a vague recollection,' she [Woolf] confessed to her publisher Jonathan Cape six years later, 'that he wrote to me when (it) first appeared and said that I had exaggerated his father's lack of education--or something of the kind. But I did not gather that he objected to the article as a whole, and he certainly did not ask me to alter it or suppress it.'" ("A Voice that Spoke Straight and Shapely Words": Gissing in the Works and Papers of Virginia Woolf, in The Gissing Newsletter, Volume XXIII, No. 3, July 1987, pp. 11-13).

On October 13, 1932, three days after Woolf's letter here to Middlebrook, Woolf received a letter from Cape informing her of his intention to use her fourth essay as the introduction in his reprint of Ionian Sea. He offered her five guineas and suggested she alter it to suit the new publication. Woolf demurred to revising the essay, but accepted the money, and allowed the work to be printed. Upon the work's publication early in 1933 a public quarrel ensued between Gissing, Woolf, and Cape. Gissing, mad about the essay's publication introducing his father's work, angrily wrote to Cape in February 1933 informing him of his displeasure and also that he never gave approval to use Woolf's essay previously as the introduction to Selections. As Coustillas recounts, "he (Alfred) protested against the publisher's free and easy manners...Why such an introductory piece, which in 1929 had been censured by admirers of his father, had been revived despite his explicit disapproval of it, was more than he could understand. Faulty and carelessly written he had called it, and utterly unsuited to this particular book of his father's which was not even mentioned by Mrs. Woolf. He obviously hoped that the copies he received were advance copies, since he expressed his desire to have a slip inserted at the beginning of the book, stating that he dissociated himself entirely from the use of such an introduction. The book, he thought, needed no introduction, and surely not one like that printed by Cape--a mere inaccurate excrescence." (p. 14).

Gissing then took to the press and issued a public statement in the Times Literary Supplement disavowing the essay and the publication of his father's work. Woolf responded later in the same paper claiming responsibility for the essay, and sought clarity on the inaccuracies, but her essay was never edited, and the essay was reprinted without revisions in later editions of her The Common Reader.