• Paperback
• Condition: Very Good
• 453 pages
• Fiction: Classics

'Marriage rarely means happiness, either for man or woman; if it be not too grievous to be borne, one must thank the fates and take courage...'

First published in 1897, shortly before Gissing's health collapsed and he moved to France, The Whirlpool is his last ambitious novel, and the last he wrote while still with his second wife.

The dominant figure is Alma Rolfe, torn between an idyll of rural domesticity and her career in London as a violinist. Through her Gissing elaborates, sympathetically but without illusions, his vision of marriage as often leading to 'baffled ambition, a life of envy, hatred, fear, suffered in secret, hidden by base of paltry subterfuge'.

Set in the world of late-Victorian rentiers, among a class that was all too aware of the fragility of its social pretensions and the fatal attractions of fashionable metropolitan life, The Whirlpool is one of the great masterpieces of English social realism - a sombrely powerful diagnosis of the faultiness of human institutions and the suffering of those caught up in them.