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The Crown of Life
So what is the crown of life? Follow the journey of Piers and Irene as they attempt to discover. It is both a coming of age novel and love story at the same time, one which would bring delight to philosophers with many conversations for and against imperialism, romantics who would follow the long courtship in the center of the plot, and sociologists who would follow with interest the vivid way in which George Gissing describes the society in which he lived.
340 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1899
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About the author
George Gissing
391 books204 followersPeople best know British writer George Robert Gissing for his novels, such as
New Grub Street
(1891), about poverty and hardship.
This English novelist who published twenty-three novels between 1880 and 1903. From his early naturalistic works, he developed into one of the most accomplished realists of the late-Victorian era.
Born to lower-middle-class parents, Gissing went to win a scholarship to Owens College, the present-day University of Manchester. A brilliant student, he excelled at university, winning many coveted prizes, including the Shakespeare prize in 1875. Between 1891 and 1897 (his so-called middle period) he produced his best works, which include New Grub Street, Born in Exile , The Odd Women , In the Year of Jubilee , and The Whirlpool . The middle years of the decade saw his reputation reach new heights: some critics count him alongside George Meredith and Thomas Hardy, the best novelists of his day. He also enjoyed new friendships with fellow writers such as Henry James, and H.G. Wells, and came into contact with many other up-and-coming writers such as Joseph Conrad and Stephen Crane.
This English novelist who published twenty-three novels between 1880 and 1903. From his early naturalistic works, he developed into one of the most accomplished realists of the late-Victorian era.
Born to lower-middle-class parents, Gissing went to win a scholarship to Owens College, the present-day University of Manchester. A brilliant student, he excelled at university, winning many coveted prizes, including the Shakespeare prize in 1875. Between 1891 and 1897 (his so-called middle period) he produced his best works, which include New Grub Street, Born in Exile , The Odd Women , In the Year of Jubilee , and The Whirlpool . The middle years of the decade saw his reputation reach new heights: some critics count him alongside George Meredith and Thomas Hardy, the best novelists of his day. He also enjoyed new friendships with fellow writers such as Henry James, and H.G. Wells, and came into contact with many other up-and-coming writers such as Joseph Conrad and Stephen Crane.
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January 11, 2025
Gissing's Crown Of Life
Best-known for "New Grub Street" and "The Odd Women", the Victorian author George Gissing (1857 -- 1903) wrote more than twenty novels during his short life. One of Gissing's neglected works is "The Crown of Life" published in 1899, late in his career. I wanted to visit Gissing again and to reread this novel.
For Gissing and this novel, the "crown of life" is true romantic love. Gissing's books explore what he often sees (and in his wiser moments criticizes) as the tension and dichotomy between romantic love and sexuality. In "The Crown of Life", romance and idealism appear to win at the end, unlike the result in most of Gissing's books. Gissing wrote the book after two dismal marriages, when he met and fell in love with a woman, Gabrielle Fleury, to whom he could respond on an intellectual as well as physical level. Gabrielle Fleury, had been translating Gissing's books into French. He would remain with Gabrielle for the rest of his life. In a letter, Gissing wrote of his aim in writing "The Crown of Life":
"Under the guise of fiction, this book deals with the most solemn questions of life, and in no light spirit. I have not felt a disagreeable contrast between this work and the sad realities which have fallen upon us. For it has never been my habit to write flippantly, idly. I have never written only to gain money, to please the foolish. And my reward is that -- however poor what I have done -- I do not feel it ignoble."
The book tells of the eight-year courtship by a young man, Piers Otway of a woman named Irene Derwent. Otway is the illegitimate son of a middle-class scholar and former political activist and supporter of liberal positions. When the novel opens, he is a youth of 21, taken with the idea of love, but studying hard to pass the civil service examination for a secure government career. While his is boarding with old friends in the suburbs, he meets a visitor, Irene, and is immediately and inexplicably smitten. Otway is so taken with Irene that he can no longer concentrate on his studies. He gives up the civil service exam and goes into business instead for the Russian office of a large firm. Irene is cool, proper, and polished and from an upper-class background. She flirts mildly with Otway but rebukes him for a minor gaffe during a social affair. The relationship appears to be an end before it begins, particularly because Irene soon makes a promising engagement with a rising young man in Britain's colonial empire. But Otway perseveres in his dreams.
In addition to developing the story of Otway and Irene, the novel has a political component. Gissing wrote the book after the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, had proposed a disarmament conference as part of a claimed campaign for world peace. Gissing called "The Crown of Life" his "anti-jingo novel." The book is critical of British imperialism and of the expansion of the British empire under large, unrestrained capitalism. Gissing feared with substantial justification that imperialism would soon lead to war. The anti-jingoism of the book is not fully integrated with the love story. While working in Russia, Otway becomes taken with the Russian peace movement and with individuals living under the influence of the ideals of Tolstoy. The many characters in the novel discuss and debate British imperialism at length. Several of the characters in the book, including Irene's fiancé and one of her erstwhile suitors, are involved in promoting British colonial interests while one particularly detestable character is involved in arms manufacture. With a limited degree of success, the novel tries to show that the aim of many people in settling for a life of drudgery and for less that full romantic love in the personal lives is tied to the colonialism, impersonality, and warlike tendencies of British late nineteenth-century capitalism.
The strongest scenes of the novel focus on Piers Otway as a lonely young man in both Britain and Russia. Otway must deal with his sexual needs while he dreams of Irene from afar and stumbles through to success in business. He is plagued by his illegitimate birth, by his lack of inheritance, and by scandals involving his two legitimate but wastrel elder brothers. Otway perseveres in his goal of finding true love as the most worthwhile endeavor of life and ultimately succeeds in winning Irene's hand. Ever the realist, Gissing fills his book with pictures of unhappy marriages and of couples who compromise themselves and marry for something less that idealized love. Both Otway and Irene almost succumb to the temptation to compromise at several points during the story.
With many interesting scenes, ideas and passages in the novel, the courtship between Piers Otway and Irene in unconvincing and unappealing. Young Otway is in love with the ideal of love and his lengthy idealization of Irene is forced. In the eight years between meeting Irene and betrothal, Otway does little more physically than touch her hand while dealing otherwise with the demands of sexuality that both Gissing and his protagonist know all-too-well. It is difficult to see what the all-too-prim and perfect Irene does to merit such devotion. Otway's idealization of the young lady does not make her likeable or desirable to the reader. To her credit, Irene develops a sense of individuality during the book as she breaks off with her fiancé upon realizing that his feelings for her verge on the conventional and the superficial. But this is insufficient to support Otway's love and his years of courtship and erotic neglect. The many bad marriages in the book together with some of the minor characters, including a bohemian painter of female nudes, suggest the price of dividing one's sexual from one's idealizing nature for so long. The novel ends in triumph, but it is unclear whether the marriage between Otway and Irene will succeed.
"The Crown of Life" is not one of Gissing's better novels. It is still worth reading and knowing as the work of a beloved and on the whole neglected author. I was glad to revisit and get to know Gissing's work better from the aspect presented in this book. The book is readily accessible online. I can't comment on the available offprint editions. The quotation from Gissing's letters is found at page 308 of Paul Delany's biography, "Gissing: a Life",
Robin Friedman
Best-known for "New Grub Street" and "The Odd Women", the Victorian author George Gissing (1857 -- 1903) wrote more than twenty novels during his short life. One of Gissing's neglected works is "The Crown of Life" published in 1899, late in his career. I wanted to visit Gissing again and to reread this novel.
For Gissing and this novel, the "crown of life" is true romantic love. Gissing's books explore what he often sees (and in his wiser moments criticizes) as the tension and dichotomy between romantic love and sexuality. In "The Crown of Life", romance and idealism appear to win at the end, unlike the result in most of Gissing's books. Gissing wrote the book after two dismal marriages, when he met and fell in love with a woman, Gabrielle Fleury, to whom he could respond on an intellectual as well as physical level. Gabrielle Fleury, had been translating Gissing's books into French. He would remain with Gabrielle for the rest of his life. In a letter, Gissing wrote of his aim in writing "The Crown of Life":
"Under the guise of fiction, this book deals with the most solemn questions of life, and in no light spirit. I have not felt a disagreeable contrast between this work and the sad realities which have fallen upon us. For it has never been my habit to write flippantly, idly. I have never written only to gain money, to please the foolish. And my reward is that -- however poor what I have done -- I do not feel it ignoble."
The book tells of the eight-year courtship by a young man, Piers Otway of a woman named Irene Derwent. Otway is the illegitimate son of a middle-class scholar and former political activist and supporter of liberal positions. When the novel opens, he is a youth of 21, taken with the idea of love, but studying hard to pass the civil service examination for a secure government career. While his is boarding with old friends in the suburbs, he meets a visitor, Irene, and is immediately and inexplicably smitten. Otway is so taken with Irene that he can no longer concentrate on his studies. He gives up the civil service exam and goes into business instead for the Russian office of a large firm. Irene is cool, proper, and polished and from an upper-class background. She flirts mildly with Otway but rebukes him for a minor gaffe during a social affair. The relationship appears to be an end before it begins, particularly because Irene soon makes a promising engagement with a rising young man in Britain's colonial empire. But Otway perseveres in his dreams.
In addition to developing the story of Otway and Irene, the novel has a political component. Gissing wrote the book after the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, had proposed a disarmament conference as part of a claimed campaign for world peace. Gissing called "The Crown of Life" his "anti-jingo novel." The book is critical of British imperialism and of the expansion of the British empire under large, unrestrained capitalism. Gissing feared with substantial justification that imperialism would soon lead to war. The anti-jingoism of the book is not fully integrated with the love story. While working in Russia, Otway becomes taken with the Russian peace movement and with individuals living under the influence of the ideals of Tolstoy. The many characters in the novel discuss and debate British imperialism at length. Several of the characters in the book, including Irene's fiancé and one of her erstwhile suitors, are involved in promoting British colonial interests while one particularly detestable character is involved in arms manufacture. With a limited degree of success, the novel tries to show that the aim of many people in settling for a life of drudgery and for less that full romantic love in the personal lives is tied to the colonialism, impersonality, and warlike tendencies of British late nineteenth-century capitalism.
The strongest scenes of the novel focus on Piers Otway as a lonely young man in both Britain and Russia. Otway must deal with his sexual needs while he dreams of Irene from afar and stumbles through to success in business. He is plagued by his illegitimate birth, by his lack of inheritance, and by scandals involving his two legitimate but wastrel elder brothers. Otway perseveres in his goal of finding true love as the most worthwhile endeavor of life and ultimately succeeds in winning Irene's hand. Ever the realist, Gissing fills his book with pictures of unhappy marriages and of couples who compromise themselves and marry for something less that idealized love. Both Otway and Irene almost succumb to the temptation to compromise at several points during the story.
With many interesting scenes, ideas and passages in the novel, the courtship between Piers Otway and Irene in unconvincing and unappealing. Young Otway is in love with the ideal of love and his lengthy idealization of Irene is forced. In the eight years between meeting Irene and betrothal, Otway does little more physically than touch her hand while dealing otherwise with the demands of sexuality that both Gissing and his protagonist know all-too-well. It is difficult to see what the all-too-prim and perfect Irene does to merit such devotion. Otway's idealization of the young lady does not make her likeable or desirable to the reader. To her credit, Irene develops a sense of individuality during the book as she breaks off with her fiancé upon realizing that his feelings for her verge on the conventional and the superficial. But this is insufficient to support Otway's love and his years of courtship and erotic neglect. The many bad marriages in the book together with some of the minor characters, including a bohemian painter of female nudes, suggest the price of dividing one's sexual from one's idealizing nature for so long. The novel ends in triumph, but it is unclear whether the marriage between Otway and Irene will succeed.
"The Crown of Life" is not one of Gissing's better novels. It is still worth reading and knowing as the work of a beloved and on the whole neglected author. I was glad to revisit and get to know Gissing's work better from the aspect presented in this book. The book is readily accessible online. I can't comment on the available offprint editions. The quotation from Gissing's letters is found at page 308 of Paul Delany's biography, "Gissing: a Life",
Robin Friedman
July 30, 2024
The following was posted on March 3, 2021 as a comment on a friend’s review of this novel. My comment has not been edited for presentation as a personal review (yet!)
I read your review before beginning to read this novel. Now, having finished the book and revisited your review, I can say enphatically how helpful it is to me and I thank you for it.
As always with Gissing’s novels, I found this one challenging in both its length and its breadth, covering as it does eight years in the life of Piers Otway and discussing a range of social and political issues of the time. I agree with you that Gissing did not successfully integrate these issues with the romantic elements of the story. The result was, for me, a fragmented reading experience. Some of these discussions did not seem to fit the context of the plot and sounded more like lectures than conversations.
I agree also that Irene is not convincing as a love interest. She did nothing significant to warrant or encourage Piers’s obsession with her. Although she was able to converse intelligently on subjects which interested him, it was with little sense of personal conviction and, once engaged to Arnold Jacks, she very easily “crossed the floor”. Yet the reader is meant to believe, in the end, that Irene has suddenly realised that Piers Otway has been her “ideal” all along!
Piers himself is a very complex character — an immature one who, indeed, grew in some ways over the eight-year span of the story; but nonetheless he remained a young man who clung to his unrealistic and idealistic image of Irene to the end of the novel. In his mind, she remained more a goddess than a woman.
Nevertheless, I am glad to have read this novel. Gissing was no doubt a very talented and hard-working writer, definitely high on my list of favourites. He combines sincere conviction on social issues with a keen understanding of human psychology and so always gives the reader much to ponder.
By the same author
The Paying Guest (26/11/15) 3 stars
Thyrza (28/04/16) 3 stars
A Life's Morning (30/04/16) 3 stars
The Odd Women (20/08/20) 4 stars
Sleeping Fires (19/11/20) 4 stars
Our Friend the Charlatan (19/01/21) 4 stars
The Crown of Life (02/03/21) 4 stars
Eve's Ransom (02/95/21) 4 stars
Human Odds and Ends: Stories and Sketches (30/06/21) 3 stars
The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories (07/09/21) 4 stars
The Emancipated, Volume 1 (28/02/22) 3 stars
The Emancipated, Volume 2 (14/03/22) 4 stars
The Emancipated, Volume 3 (04/04/22) 5 stars
Sins of the father,: And other tales, (16/11/23) 4 stars
I read your review before beginning to read this novel. Now, having finished the book and revisited your review, I can say enphatically how helpful it is to me and I thank you for it.
As always with Gissing’s novels, I found this one challenging in both its length and its breadth, covering as it does eight years in the life of Piers Otway and discussing a range of social and political issues of the time. I agree with you that Gissing did not successfully integrate these issues with the romantic elements of the story. The result was, for me, a fragmented reading experience. Some of these discussions did not seem to fit the context of the plot and sounded more like lectures than conversations.
I agree also that Irene is not convincing as a love interest. She did nothing significant to warrant or encourage Piers’s obsession with her. Although she was able to converse intelligently on subjects which interested him, it was with little sense of personal conviction and, once engaged to Arnold Jacks, she very easily “crossed the floor”. Yet the reader is meant to believe, in the end, that Irene has suddenly realised that Piers Otway has been her “ideal” all along!
Piers himself is a very complex character — an immature one who, indeed, grew in some ways over the eight-year span of the story; but nonetheless he remained a young man who clung to his unrealistic and idealistic image of Irene to the end of the novel. In his mind, she remained more a goddess than a woman.
Nevertheless, I am glad to have read this novel. Gissing was no doubt a very talented and hard-working writer, definitely high on my list of favourites. He combines sincere conviction on social issues with a keen understanding of human psychology and so always gives the reader much to ponder.
By the same author
The Paying Guest (26/11/15) 3 stars
Thyrza (28/04/16) 3 stars
A Life's Morning (30/04/16) 3 stars
The Odd Women (20/08/20) 4 stars
Sleeping Fires (19/11/20) 4 stars
Our Friend the Charlatan (19/01/21) 4 stars
The Crown of Life (02/03/21) 4 stars
Eve's Ransom (02/95/21) 4 stars
Human Odds and Ends: Stories and Sketches (30/06/21) 3 stars
The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories (07/09/21) 4 stars
The Emancipated, Volume 1 (28/02/22) 3 stars
The Emancipated, Volume 2 (14/03/22) 4 stars
The Emancipated, Volume 3 (04/04/22) 5 stars
Sins of the father,: And other tales, (16/11/23) 4 stars
November 27, 2023
The charm of Gissing's books lies in his resolute opposition to the oppression of the working classes by their privileged employers. ‘The Crown of Life’ also views with concern extreme right British attitudes in the fading years of Queen Victoria: the abyss between, to take a sampling, pacifism and jingoism, chartists and landed gentry, Home rule and Unionists, the Empire and protectionism on one side, and free trade politics on the other or even the raging controversy between vivisection and anti-vivisection. But while such differences are often a matter for satire, Gissing is deeply aware of the gulf between deep emotions and passions on the one hand, and on the other, the social conventions that tend to ignore or deny these, and frequently to denounce them. The whited sepulchre of hypocrisy, in other words, that sees Piers Otway as a bastard and denies him a share in his father's property, although his father himself had wished that the bulk of his estate devolve on Piers as the most promising and most beloved of his children sees at the same his two legitimate brothers as the crooks and scoundrels they are, while the mantle of respectability and morality cloaks them. Gissing’s views on militancy, the superiority of the British race, war and the sale of modern and more powerful explosives and ammunition to governments generally are prophetic of what lay ahead in 1914, just a few years after this novel’s publication.
But these are, so to speak, diversionary topics in the main story, which is that of an idealistic young man desperately in love, and how he ruins his chances by succumbing to temptation. The central theme indeed, is one of love as juxtaposed with marriage and the strange cross currents of irregular relationships, separations and romantic triangles that form the pattern of the novel. The book also deals with Piers’s redemption – “Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him.”
One of Gissing's most joyous novels, and one very unlike many of his other works. Along the way there are plots and twists, so that almost every person introduced is not just a piece of furniture in support of the protagonists' deeds, but has their own little drama to keep us engrossed. Although other novels by Gissing garnered more critical acclaim and popularity, Gissing himself is said to liked this novel best.
But these are, so to speak, diversionary topics in the main story, which is that of an idealistic young man desperately in love, and how he ruins his chances by succumbing to temptation. The central theme indeed, is one of love as juxtaposed with marriage and the strange cross currents of irregular relationships, separations and romantic triangles that form the pattern of the novel. The book also deals with Piers’s redemption – “Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him.”
One of Gissing's most joyous novels, and one very unlike many of his other works. Along the way there are plots and twists, so that almost every person introduced is not just a piece of furniture in support of the protagonists' deeds, but has their own little drama to keep us engrossed. Although other novels by Gissing garnered more critical acclaim and popularity, Gissing himself is said to liked this novel best.
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