A minor work produced during Gissing’s “major phase” (from 1889’s The Nether World to 1897’s The Whirlpool), Sleeping Fires (1895) is of interest to Gissing scholars because of the author’s revisitation of class-related themes from his earliest work. The text thus offers an intriguing glance backwards from a mature vantage point. The author wrote twenty-three novels in total, excluding the unfinished Veranilda (1904). Sleeping Fires represents one of Gissing’s rare attempts to write at novella length, a surprising departure for an author accustomed to writing in the three-volume format, which was declining in popularity in the 1890s. The work presents a social milieu not generally associated with Gissing, featuring some characters belonging to the leisured class and aristocracy. Gissing had become known in the 1880s for mainly writing fiction about the working classes, then later...
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Citation: Reeves, Gareth. "Sleeping Fires". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 May 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2007, accessed 09 June 2026.]
