George Gissing

George Gissing was an English novelist who wrote twenty-three novels between 1880 and his death in 1903. His best-known books are The Nether World, New Grub Street, Born in Exile and The Odd Women, which came out between 1889 and 1893. Born in Wakefield to lower-middle-class parents, he won a scholarship to Owens College in Manchester, and by the end of the century critics placed him alongside Thomas Hardy and George Meredith as one of the leading novelists in England.