George Gissing’s novels have disturbed readers whose taste is for sympathetic identification. In this new study, John Sloan aims to unravel the enigma that fascinated both Henry James and Virginia Woolf who recognized the compelling interest and unusual artistic effects in George Gissing’s novels. He probes the social and ideological tensions of Gissing’s inner separation or exile and aims to show how these enter into the very form of the novel to produce the insights and effects of his work. A detailed account of the novels, in its suggestions of influences at work on Gissing (for example, Thackeray’s Pendennis on New Grub Street , and James’ Bostonians on The Odd Women ) provides new ways of seeing Gissing, making this a critical aid both to readers of his work and of the nineteenth-century novel in general.