Miriam Baske, a young widow, leaves behind the gray stone chapels and flinty hearts of Lancashire for the sun and artistic splendor of Italy -- where she meets a host of her countrymen doing the Grand Tour.To Miriam's surprise, the English abroad are a different breed from those back home: in the bay of Naples, passion rules over reason. But will life change when they return to their own hearthsides? Reminiscent of George Eliot's Middlemarch, The Emancipated tells us as much about Victorian society -- with all its prejudices and rigid conventions -- as it does about one's woman's growth to human understanding. Published in 1890, it was Gissing's last novel before the more embittered view of New Grub Street -- a proclamation of hope, of freedom in the midst of Victorian darkness.... George Gissing was an English novelist, who wrote twenty-three novels between 1880 and 1903. Although his early works are naturalistic, he developed into one of the the most accomplished realists of the late-Victorian era. Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, to lower-middle class parents, Gissing went on to win a scholarship to Owens College, the present day University of Manchester. A brilliant student, he excelled at university, winning many coveted prizes, including the Shakespeare prize in 1875. Between 1891 and 1897 (his so-called middle period) he produced his best works, which include New Grub Street, Born in Exile, The Odd Women, In the Year of Jubilee, and The Whirlpool. The middle years of the decade saw his reputation reach new heights: by some critics he is counted alongside George Meredith and Thomas Hardy as one of the best three novelists of his day. He also enjoyed new friendships with fellow writers such as Henry James, and H.G. Wells, and came into contact with many other up and coming writers such as Joseph Conrad and Stephen Crane.