– + Ath. 1906, 2: 67. Jl. 21. 210w.
“The story as a whole is rather cloying.”
– + N. Y. Times. 11: 192. Mr. 31, ’06. 470w.
“There are gentle pathos and quaint humor to be found throughout.”
+ Outlook. 82: 718. Mr. 24, ’06. 50w.
Gissing, George Robert. [House of cobwebs] and other stories. $1.50. Dutton.
“The fifteen stories included in this posthumous volume are prefaced by an introductory survey of the work of their lamented author [by Mr. Thomas Seccombe].... The stories themselves, slight as is their texture, are ‘admirable specimens of Gissing’s own genre.’ They manifest the delicate tenderness of his feeling not for, but with those to whom life has not been kind.... As Dickens was the novelist of the recognized poor, Gissing is the novelist of those poorer poor who belong of right to another class.”—N. Y. Times.
+ + – Acad. 70: 479. My. 19, ’06. 880w.
“But what is certain, and is rendered positive by this book, is that he had little artistic sense of the short story. These are mere blotches of feeling, studies of atmosphere; they are never stories. They might have found their use in corners of a long novel. They have neither beginning nor ending, only being; and they might well leave off before or after their conclusion. Never was there a more glaring lack of the ‘dramatic’ than in Mr. Gissing.”