Paying Guest (version 2 dramatic reading)

Clarence and Emmeline Mumford want a respectable paying guest: quiet, grateful, and willing to stay in her proper place. What they get is Louise Derrick, a young woman with sharp opinions, an inconvenient independent streak, and absolutely no intention of performing the deference Victorian "proper society" demands. As Louise unsettles the Mumfords' carefully constructed sense of status, Gissing turns his naturalistic eye on the anxious theater of middle-class English life, where every interaction is a negotiation, every social grace a defense mechanism, and respectability hangs by a thread. Funny, incisive, and wonderfully uncomfortable, this is Gissing at his most accessible, skewering the pretensions of respectable England with precision and glee. Perfect for readers who love Victorian social comedy, complex female characters, and novels that reveal how much work it takes to appear effortless.