George Gissing remains the most underrated novelist in the English language. He wrote twenty-three novels, although the average bookshop today only contains four of them. Two of these – New Grub Street, a harrowing story of London literary life, and The Odd Women, the most powerful feminist novel of its century – are acknowledged masterpieces; less so The Nether World and The Whirlpool. A few others are available to order from quality independent presses: these include my favourite, Demos, which concerns the gradual corruption of a working-class socialist who inherits a fortune, and the autobiographical debut Workers in the Dawn. The scope of his talent is exceptional. He is a Balzac, a Turgenev, and a Zola; he is also a Dickens, a Lawrence, and an Orwell.
In recent years Grayswood Press has done more than any other publisher in bringing closer the far-off day when complete sets of him will be as widely available as sets of Dickens. This excellent new edition of Veranilda: A Story of Roman and Goth, the historical novel left unfinished at Gissing’s death, is edited and introduced by Markus Neacey, an independent scholar and editor of the quarterly Gissing Journal. Neacey is the best Gissing scholar since Pierre Coustillas. He not only provides a lucid and comprehensive discussion of Veranilda’s genesis, historical context, critical appraisal, and much else but, astonishingly, has copied out the entire text of the novel from the original manuscript as it was on Gissing’s death in 1903. Oxford World’s Classics would benefit from this level of dedication.
Outwardly, Veranilda seems to be an atypical book for a man who made his name chronicling the London slums and the shabby-genteel middle classes. Under the surface, however, the entire package of Gissing’s motifs is here – inherited fortunes, literary men, noblewomen, love across social divides, the pressure of convention – the only difference being that it is wrapped up in a blazing historical epic instead of a piece of Victorian realism. Gissing, a classical scholar and devotee of Gibbon, succeeds in placing his story against the backdrop of sixth-century Italy, when the Romans were caught between Greek occupation and barbarian invasion. Anyone interested in the historical context can do no better than to read the illuminating introduction in this edition. To the non-historian the period detail remains remarkable for its immersiveness, its enduring picturesqueness and grandeur. As Neacey puts it: “In its elegiacal evocation of a decadent and decaying historical empire, it is a novel which is as relevant today as when it was first written.”
The plot sweeps pacily through love scenes, duels, monasteries, royal courts, and medieval landscapes, and watching it unfold is like watching a Technicolor epic such as Ben-Hur or Cleopatra. As with all Gissing’s novels, there is not a wasted scene or filler chapter anywhere. There are several vividly drawn characters – including the brooding Maximas, the bold Heliodora, and the scheming Marcian – although the key players are Basil, a Roman noble, and Veranilda, a Gothic princess. Theirs is a case of love at first sight and, throughout the novel, various things contrive to keep them apart.
First there is the stigma attached to their difference of religion – he is a Catholic and she a Goth – and Gissing is acute as ever here in describing the pressure of social convention on character. Then Veranilda is kidnapped – by whom, Basil gallops away to find out – and the process of suspicion, discovery, and elimination sustains the pace for a large chunk of the story. In the final instance they are separated by the character of Marcian; he is something of an Iago figure, jealous, lustful, and subtly sadistic, who initially helps in the search for Veranilda, but then, falling for her, turns her against Basil, only then to be confronted by him in a bloody chapter of enormous dramatic power. It is a credit to Gissing that he executes it without becoming melodramatic. Following the violence, Veranilda and Basil, distrustful of one another, exchange bitter words. A few chapters later they are reconciled. Some of the love scenes are not, admittedly, samples of Gissing’s most mature or realistic writing:
‘My fairest! Let me but touch your hand. Lay it for a moment in mine—a pledge for ever!’
‘You do not fear to love me, O lord of my life?’
The whisper made him faint with joy.
‘What has fear to do with love, O thou with heaven in thine eyes! what room is there for fear in the heart where thy beauty dwells?’ etc., etc.
Fortunately, this Romeo and Juliet stuff is kept to a minimum. A more significant flaw than the occasional archaism is the fact that the novel was never completed; three weeks after writing Chapter 30 the author fell into an illness and died. Even this is not a huge problem. Gissing was a careful constructor of plots and his workmanlike style required very little finetuning, with the result that in spite of the slightly jarring ending the novel as a whole remains richly readable. Some of the descriptive work, especially of the Italian landscapes, reaches heights of beauty which he rarely achieved:
Soon after sunrise, he was carried forth to his place of observation, a portico in semicircle, the marble honey-toned by time… Below him lay the little town, built on the cliffs above its landing-place; the hillsides on either hand were clad with vineyards, splendid in the purple of autumn, with olives. Sky and sea shone to each other in perfect calm; the softly breathing air mingled its morning freshness with a scent of fallen flower and leaf. A rosy vapour from Vesuvius floated gently inland…
For all this, Veranilda is not the place to start for anyone looking to become familiar with Gissing. The book is not representative of his body of work and, if he had been solely a historical novelist, he is unlikely to have produced anything of the calibre of New Grub Street or Born in Exile. Fans of fantasy, epic, or historical fiction will find more to suit them here, and will appreciate it for what it is: a fantastic effort of the imagination, by turns thrilling and serene, with a watertight plot and powerfully observed characters.
Veranilda is available now from Grayswood Press. ISBN: 978-1-7396203-1-8.
