0,49 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Eve's Ransom," George Gissing presents a poignant exploration of the Victorian struggle between idealism and the harsh realities of society. This novel intricately weaves the tale of the sensitive but disillusioned artist, Felix, and his complex relationship with the morally ambiguous Eve. Gissing's literary style employs lush, descriptive prose that captures both the internal conflicts of his characters and the stark social backdrop of industrial England. Set against the constraints of late 19th-century society, the book delves into themes of gender, economic disparity, and the pursuit of personal freedom, making it a critical piece within the literary context of the era's emerging realist movement. George Gissing, an author informed by his own experiences of poverty and societal marginalization, wrote "Eve's Ransom" during a time of great personal and social turmoil. His life was marked by financial hardship and a keen insight into the lives of the disenfranchised, allowing him to authentically portray the struggles faced by his characters. Gissing's own tumultuous relationships and deep sympathy for women in oppressive circumstances further enrich the novel's emotional depth and moral complexity. Highly recommended for readers interested in Victorian literature and social criticism, "Eve's Ransom" serves as both a gripping narrative and a profound reflection on the human condition. Through Gissing's masterful storytelling, readers will find themselves navigating the intricate dynamics of love, ambition, and the quest for personal fulfillment amidst an unforgiving societal structure. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Ähnliche
Eve's Ransom
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the uneasy intersection of desire, class ambition, and the price of personal liberty, this novel asks how far money can go in altering a life without distorting the heart that offers it or the will that receives it, following a tentative bond between two people whose hopes collide with the practical arithmetic of late-Victorian society, and tracing their hesitant negotiations over dignity, trust, and self-respect as circumstances tempt them to experiment with an arrangement that promises release from constraint while unveiling the moral debts that accompany any attempt to purchase freedom from the slow grind of economic necessity.
Eve’s Ransom is a work of late-Victorian realism, set against the urban and provincial landscapes of industrial England and the magnetism of the metropolis. First published in the mid-1890s, it belongs to George Gissing’s mature period, when he examined the pressures of modern city life and the limits of social mobility. Readers encounter offices, lodgings, and public spaces where appearances matter and options are few. The book combines social observation with psychological nuance, offering a compact narrative that situates private longing within a culture preoccupied by respectability, work, and the power of money to rearrange—yet rarely simplify—the conditions of everyday existence.
The premise is disarmingly simple: a young man of modest means encounters a young woman whose opportunities are constrained by her circumstances, and an unexpected change in his finances tempts him to intervene. From this initial act—part generosity, part experiment—the story unfolds as a careful study of boundaries, expectations, and the shifting meanings of obligation. Without resorting to melodrama, the novel builds its tension through conversations, small decisions, and the social rituals that govern courtship and employment. The result is a quietly suspenseful exploration of whether a financial lifeline can be offered without encroaching on the recipient’s independence or dignity.
Gissing’s voice here is measured, observant, and unsentimental. He favors close attention to motive and mood, rendering inner conflict with a precision that resists easy moralizing. The style is economical and lucid, allowing the friction of class, gender, and aspiration to surface through gesture, silence, and implication rather than declamation. Scenes are anchored in concrete detail—streets, rooms, and workplaces—yet the emphasis remains on how environment shapes choice. Readers should expect an intimate scale, a steady pace, and a focus on character over plot machinery, with irony used sparingly to illuminate the costs of small compromises and the fragility of hope.
At its core, Eve’s Ransom interrogates the moral economy of assistance: when does a gift become a bargain, and can gratitude coexist with autonomy? It probes the pressures of respectability, the precariousness of employment, and the vulnerability of women navigating public and private scrutiny. The novel considers how money magnifies desire and fear, transforming acts of kindness into tests of motive and endurance. It also reflects on self-improvement and constraint—how one might seek a life beyond drudgery without surrendering self-command. These themes are not argued abstractly; they emerge from everyday negotiations over time, movement, and the right to choose one’s future.
The questions the book raises feel strikingly current. In a world still marked by economic precarity and uneven power dynamics, it invites reflection on consent, boundaries, and the emotional calculus of help offered and accepted. Readers will recognize contemporary echoes in debates about financial dependence, the dignity of work, and the ambiguities of generosity within intimate relationships. The novel’s restraint—its refusal to sensationalize—encourages a patient, critical attention that rewards empathy over judgment. It offers the experience of watching two people try to define terms for connection without slipping into possession, a process as fraught today as it was in the 1890s.
Situated among Gissing’s late-century studies of urban striving, Eve’s Ransom stands out for its compactness and clarity of focus, making it an accessible entry into his vision of modern life’s quiet urgencies. It offers readers a thoughtful story about money’s seductions and limits, about the difference between release and escape, and about the stubborn desire to be seen as a person rather than a project. Without spoiling its unfolding, one can say that the novel asks what freedom costs, who pays, and how conscience tallies the account—questions that continue to shadow the ways we love, work, and imagine better lives.
Synopsis
Maurice Hilliard, a capable but frustrated mechanical draughtsman in industrial Birmingham, lives a narrow, constrained life shaped by low wages and boarding-house routines. Amid the drab regularity, he recalls Eve Madeley, a young woman whose poise and intelligence briefly impressed him, and whose situation mirrors his own confinement. The novel opens with Hilliard’s restlessness sharpened by a sense of missed chances and a yearning for a more human, expansive existence. Set against late-Victorian pressures of respectability and work, the story begins by tracing how a private fixation turns into a plan, as Hilliard mixes daydreams with a keen observation of social barriers.
Hilliard encounters Eve again and learns more concretely about her duties and limitations. She is heavily burdened by long hours and low prospects, yet she maintains dignity and ambition, keenly aware of the precarious balance required to preserve independence and reputation. Their renewed acquaintance is cautious and formal, governed by convention, but it opens a window onto shared dissatisfactions. Hilliard is struck by the contrast between Eve’s capacities and the smallness of her opportunities. Gradually, his vague longing crystallizes into a concept: if circumstances could be altered by a decisive act, perhaps both their lives might escape the routine that threatens to absorb them.
An unexpected windfall, obtained under conditions that raise difficult ethical questions, transforms Hilliard’s horizon. With money in hand and uncertain ownership shadowing it, he sees a chance to intervene in a way ordinary courtship could not. He imagines a strictly defined offer that would remove Eve from exhausting work, at least for a time, allowing her to cultivate tastes and talents, unpressed by immediate necessity. The plan is audacious precisely because it conflicts with social expectations, inviting suspicion and misunderstanding. Hilliard wrestles with the morality of means and ends, convinced that the money, properly used, might serve as a liberating instrument rather than a chain.
When Hilliard presents his proposal to Eve, he carefully frames it as support without obligation: a sum placed at her discretion to buy freedom from drudgery and to open doors otherwise closed. Eve’s response is measured, wary, and thoughtful. She sees both the opportunity and the risks—to pride, to reputation, to the delicate balance of gratitude and autonomy. Family considerations and the likely judgment of acquaintances complicate the decision. After deliberation, limits and understandings are set. The arrangement positions them in a new relation, neither courtship nor patronage in a conventional sense, and it tests their capacity for candor, restraint, and trust as circumstances begin to shift.
Eve relocates to London, where broader horizons beckon: libraries, galleries, lectures, and social spaces that promise culture and advancement. She organizes her days with care, experimenting with independence while navigating the codes that guard respectability. Hilliard, remaining partly at a distance, struggles with the unease created by his own generosity. He visits, observes, and sometimes withdraws, uncertain how closely to approach without compromising the very freedom he intended to grant. The city intensifies their ambiguities. Anonymous crowds, chance meetings, and subtle social gradations create a dynamic in which both can expand their selves, yet also lose sight of the boundaries they vowed to respect.
New acquaintances appear around Eve: educated men and women, instructors and casual companions who reflect a more cosmopolitan existence. She tests roles as learner, friend, and equal, weighing subtle invitations and expectations. Letters and brief conversations with Hilliard maintain a delicate thread, as each attempts to define what mutual consideration means without explicit claims. Hilliard’s misgivings surface as jealousy and anxiety about rivals, not entirely rational but rooted in his sacrifice and hope. The narrative emphasizes ordinary scenes rather than melodrama—walks, shared confidences, and small social missteps—gradually recalibrating the relationship’s terms and raising questions about how generosity intersects with power.
As weeks pass, the practical edges of the arrangement sharpen. Money, while liberating, is finite, and its depletion brings urgency to talk of work, future plans, and the sustainability of independence. Eve articulates ambitions beyond temporary relief, seeking skills and a footing that will outlast benefaction. Hilliard’s conscience is pricked by the origins of his means and by the unevenness inherent in their situation. A brief journey away from London provides a quieter setting for candid exchanges. There, both acknowledge what has changed: the hazards of surveillance, the weight of indebtedness, and the possibility that an act meant to free may also silently constrain.
The story moves toward a turning point shaped by misunderstandings, clarifications, and firmer declarations. Eve insists on the right to choose her companions and her course, treating the money as a tool rather than a bond. Hilliard confronts the implications of his method—how motives, however generous, can blur into claims. Conversations become plainer, testing civility without tipping into rupture. The narrative avoids easy gesture or sensational reveal, focusing instead on the cumulative pressure of ordinary choices. What follows is a decisive arrangement about boundaries and continuities, poised between rapprochement and separation, leaving the largest question suspended as circumstances and character exert their force.
Eve’s Ransom closes with a sober recognition that liberation carries costs and that goodwill cannot erase structural limits. The book’s central message turns on the negotiation between desire and autonomy, on how money exposes character while enabling and complicating freedom. Without stating a definitive resolution, it underscores respect for self-direction, the hunger for culture and security, and the moral ambiguities of benefaction. Gissing’s narrative highlights ordinary life as the stage for significant decisions, avoiding stark villainy or romantic excess. The result is a study in balance: between gratitude and independence, hope and restraint, and the thin line separating rescue from control.
Historical Context
Set chiefly in the late 1880s–1890s, the novel unfolds between Birmingham—the industrial heart of the West Midlands—and London, the vast metropolis drawing ambitious clerks and shopworkers. Birmingham’s smoke-stained workshops, back-to-back courts, and new municipal boulevards coexist with horse trams and gaslit streets; London offers anonymity, cheap lodgings, and a maze of suburban rail lines. Telegraphs, the penny post, and affordable rail fares compress distance, making pursuit and flight plausible within days rather than weeks. This geography shapes characters’ expectations: the Midland city promises steady but confining work, while the capital’s dynamism suggests opportunity and peril, situating the story within the competitive, mobile world of late Victorian urban life.
Birmingham’s municipal transformation under Joseph Chamberlain (mayor, 1873–1876) pioneered “gas-and-water” socialism: the city bought out private gas and water companies, funded slum clearances, and drove the 1875 Improvement Scheme that cut Corporation Street through congested courts (major works from 1879 into the mid-1880s). While sanitary reform advanced, metalworking, jewellery, and arms manufacture (notably BSA, founded 1861) still relied on low-paid piecework and dense workshop districts. The novel’s Birmingham sequences mirror this paradox of civic pride amid constraint: respectable but narrow prospects, crowded lodgings, and rigid workplace hierarchies press upon characters whose talents outstrip the routine vacancies of the brass-foundry and drawing-office economy.
The Long Depression (c. 1873–1896) brought price deflation and intermittent unemployment that pinched lower-middle-class clerks as much as artisans. In Britain, credit tightened after the Barings Crisis of 1890, when the Bank of England organized a rescue over Argentine loan exposure; hiring slowed and salaries stagnated. Male clerks commonly earned around £70–£100 per annum, scarcely covering rent and clothing, while shopwomen and copyists might receive 10–15 shillings per week. Such figures illuminate the novel’s preoccupation with money as leverage and vulnerability: economic windfalls, savings, and debts become instruments of power, and the very idea of “ransom” dramatizes how precarious income chains social relations to calculation and constraint.
In the 1890s, the “New Woman” controversy intersected with real shifts in women’s legal status and employment. The Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882, with clarifying provisions in 1893) let wives control earnings and property; the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) raised the age of consent to 16, intensifying debates on sexual ethics. Offices adopted the typewriter in the 1880s, and the 1891 census recorded sharp growth in female clerks, telegraphists, and typists. The novel reflects these currents in Eve’s pursuit of independent income and movement. Her insistence on self-determination—and the social costs of seeking it—renders in personal terms the public disputes over women’s work, respectability, and contractual freedom.
Compulsory mass schooling reshaped ambition. The Elementary Education Act of 1870 established school boards; the 1880 Act made attendance compulsory to age 10; and the 1891 “fee grant” effectively abolished elementary fees. Literacy exceeded 90% by 1891, while competitive examinations opened clerical and Civil Service pathways. Evening institutes, Mechanics’ Institutes, and shorthand schools proliferated in industrial towns. Yet the supply of the schooled outpaced white-collar demand, depressing salaries and producing a clerical reserve army. The novel’s characters embody that tension: diligent, lettered, and aspiring, they still confront bottlenecks, patronage, and the humiliations of small salaries, showing how education promised mobility while channeling many into crowded, poorly paid urban offices.
Housing reform advanced unevenly. The Public Health Act (1875) standardized local sanitary powers; the London County Council (created 1889) used the Housing of the Working Classes Act (1890) to clear rookeries and erect model dwellings, as in the Boundary Street Estate (Bethnal Green, begun 1890). Philanthropic bodies like the Peabody Trust (from 1862) added stock, but rents and rules enforced respectability. Birmingham continued clearing back-to-backs across the 1880s–1890s. In the novel, boarding houses and lodgings function as moral and economic filters—cheap yet surveilled, transient yet reputationally risky—capturing how reform improved drains and daylight without dissolving the social scrutiny and insecurity attached to single women and poorly paid clerks.
Transport and leisure infrastructures widened horizons. Mainline routes linked Birmingham to London’s Euston and St Pancras; the Cheap Trains Act (1883) expanded workmen’s fares; and the Bank Holiday Act (1871) spurred mass seaside excursions. Urban mobility quickened with the electric City & South London Railway (1890), the world’s first deep-level tube, alongside telegraphy and an efficient penny post. The 1890s cycling boom further symbolized personal freedom, especially for women. In the novel, such networks enable pursuit, evasion, and self-remaking: a clerk can follow a sudden lead across counties, a woman can vanish to the coast for breathing space, and both can test the limits of anonymity in the capital’s crowds.
The book operates as a pointed social critique of late Victorian urban modernity. It exposes the fragility of lower-middle-class respectability under deflationary pressure, the moralization of women’s economic choices despite legal reforms, and the way municipal or imperial progress coexists with intimate dependence on small salaries and gifts. Money’s power to coerce—through rent, clothing, and credit—reveals class stratification masked by genteel manners. By dramatizing a woman’s bid for autonomy within a culture of surveillance and a man’s pride strained by stagnant wages, the narrative indicts a system that celebrates self-help while arranging the market to keep aspiration tethered to precarious employment and social judgment.
