New Grub Street

In the London literary world of the 1880s, Edwin Reardon, a sensitive novelist of real talent, can no longer write, and poverty slowly destroys his marriage to the ambitious Amy. His friend Jasper Milvain, a cheerful, cynical journalist, writes whatever sells and rises steadily. Around them struggle the bitter scholar Alfred Yule, his daughter Marian, who loves Jasper, and Harold Biffen, who starves while writing a realistic novel called 'Mr Bailey, Grocer'.

George Gissing (1857–1903), who knew poverty himself, published the novel in 1891, and it remains one of the most honest books ever written about the business of writing. The title comes from Grub Street, the old London street of hack writers. Compare Dickens's David Copperfield.