This page is maintained with the generous support of Pierre Coustillas. Anyone who has any information on the matters below, or who would like to post a query here, please contact the website administrator.
 

• The whereabouts of the autograph letters from Gissing to his family which the editors of the Collected Letters could only reprint, in their incomplete form, from the old volume of Letters to the Family (1927). Many of them were sold between the wars. There are letters to Algernon, Margaret, Ellen and their mother, also to Walter, which are known to have been written and which must be either in private collections or in little-known American libraries. Other letters mentioned in auction or booksellers' catalogues are sought: for instance the long letter that Gissing wrote to George Bainton on the art of fiction before leaving England in the autumn of 1888, or the letter of 14 April 1889 to Mary Carter about her novel Mrs. Severn, or the first batch of letters to Herbert Heaton Sturmer which is only known through a Heffers catalogue and of which very few extracts were available to the editors of the Collected Letters.

 
• The whereabouts of the MSS of the following works by Gissing: The Unclassed, A Life's Morning (only the location of the MS of Ch. 3, pp. 26-37, minus 35, has been traced; see the Harvester edition of the novel), The Odd Women, Sleeping Fires, The Paying Guest, and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (the MS of the first version of "An Author at Grass" is held by the Lilly Library).

 
•  Gissing wrote a review of G.W. Steevens, Three Cities (Blackwood, 1901). An extract from this review appeared in the French journal Les Langues Modernes, about forty years ago. Where was the original published?

 
• On 13 December 1950 in London Sotheby & Co. sold a series of 30 autograph letters and other items concerning Gissing written by his friends and contemporaries, including W. D. Howells, W. J. Locke, Richard Le Gallienne, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, Sir Edmund Gosse etc. The lot was purchased by Stonehill of New Haven, Connecticut, but that firm has no records of its eventual home. One supposition is that the bulk of the lot was in fact made up of letters from H.G. Wells to Gissing. It is possible that the letters, etc were originally collected either by Morley Roberts when he was writing The Private Life of Henry Maitland, or by the publisher, Eveleigh Nash. Any information about the present whereabouts of this lot or items from it is sought.