Blackwell Reference Online

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In the opening chapter of George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street (1891), the literary entrepreneur Jasper Milvain offers his sister Maud some practical advice against her purist notions of the art of writing. He urges her to consider writing “Sunday-school prize-books” and when she regards this as “an inferior kind of work” he offers the following response: Inferior? Oh, if you can be a George Eliot begin at the earliest opportunity. I merely suggested what seemed practicable. But I don’t think you have genius, Maud. People have got that ancient prejudice so firmly rooted in their heads – that one mustn’t write save at the dictation of the Holy Spirit. I tell you, writing is a business. Get together half a dozen fair specimens of the Sunday-school prize; study them; discover the essential points of such composition; hit upon new attractions; then go to work methodically, so many pages a day. There’s no question of the divine afflatus; that belongs to another sphere of life. We talk of literature as a trade, not of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. (Gissing 1985: 43) Milvain’s distinction between “literature as a trade” and figures of literary authority such as “Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare” raises, albeit inadvertently, the role of the writer in history, and the very cultural apparatus charged with the generation of the myth of authority. If the practice of writing entails a necessary ... log in or subscribe to read full text