New Grub Street

I've long had a grim fascination with the somewhat-remembered Victorian novelist George Gissing (his diaries, for one thing, are a remarkable trudge through a writer's workmanlike subsistence), and for his great novel he found his subject close at hand: the degrading poverty of the scribblers on the edges of commercial literary life. It's a bracingly and winningly unsentimental look at two delicate and unpromising financial propositions: literature and marriage.