Just Like That, We’re Back to the City of Books
Now that Sex and the City’s reboot, And Just Like That, has finally wrapped, we suddenly have space to turn our gaze from Carrie Bradshaw’s Manhattan to another city full of women and words: Victorian London, as imagined by novelist George Gissing (1857–1903).
In a handful of his novels, Gissing followed women who read and wrote for a living — editors, copyists, transcribers, and researchers eking out an existence in London’s bustling book trade. These women wrestled not only with survival, but also with the challenge of finding meaning in work that was often undervalued, and lives that unfolded without husbands but with plenty of periodicals, pamphlets, and library cards.
Across his nearly thirty novels, Gissing’s worldview rarely offers comfort. Poverty doesn’t ennoble — it crushes. Marriage too often poisons. And ambition drains away in pursuits no one notices. Yet, in a few works, Gissing’s curiosity about women, writing, and urban life feels startlingly modern. He looked at women as thinkers and workers, chronicling their projects and frustrations in the literary economy of his time.
Even when their writing leads nowhere — when hours in the British Museum’s reading room blur into futility, or when the commission for A Child’s Guide to Parliament feels meaningless — Gissing’s women measure their lives through the lens of London’s book trade. Their professional aspirations fuse with personal desires: to be seen, to be useful, to have influence. Writing, for them, becomes both a burden and a lifeline.
They’re not saints. Some are selfless, others manipulative, most somewhere in between. Writing sharpens them — makes them cynical but also resilient. In a world that punishes single women, the pen can be a shield. Gissing’s message is clear: the penalties of independence may be harsh, but marriage to a vain, blocked, or mediocre male writer is worse.
The Lost Novelist of the City
Largely forgotten today, Gissing was a prolific and tragic figure, dying at just 46. A brilliant student undone by scandal — he lost his scholarship after stealing to support his lover’s addiction — he fled to Chicago before returning to England, where he joined contemporaries like Hardy and Meredith in charting the gritty underside of Victorian life.
His work sits within a long tradition linking women, writing, and cities. In the 16th century, poet Isabella Whitney — the first Englishwoman to publish verse — wrote of having to leave London in her Wyll and Testament (1567), even as she urged other women to keep writing. Centuries earlier, Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies imagined a symbolic metropolis built by and for women — where writing formed the very walls of female solidarity.
Sex and the City unknowingly extends this lineage. Its women, like Gissing’s, tie self-realization to storytelling — through columns, books, and conversations — as much as to love or fashion. In this tradition, a woman’s true coming-of-age requires ink, friends, and a change of address.
Gissing’s Grub Street Women
Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) captures the “valley of the shadow of books,” where inspiration runs dry and audiences vanish. Women there don’t just orbit male writers — they work beside them. Amy Yule becomes both muse and marketing mind for her husband; her cousins Dora and Maud Milvain take on hack jobs for their brother, with Maud eventually launching a literary gossip sheet.
Meanwhile, Marian Yule — ink-stained and overworked — toils as her father’s researcher, ghostwriting for him until she dares to publish her own work. Gissing doesn’t romanticize her struggle. She shares male space without fanfare, and though competition is fierce, there’s surprisingly little enmity among the women.
Later novels expand on this world. The Year of Jubilee (1894) features women lost in serialized fiction and newspaper gossip, while The Odd Women (1893) focuses on female education and office work. Here, Rhoda Nunn and Mary Barfoot run a London training school for shorthand and typing, teaching women to earn wages instead of waiting for proposals. Rhoda’s disdain for “the sentimentality of the best fiction” turns her into one of literature’s first modern knowledge-workers — a woman skeptical of the very novels she’s stepped out of.
In Gissing’s world, conversation replaces adventure; progress comes through ideas, not plots. His women write not just because they must, but because they can — and that act of authorship itself reframes older heroines like Jane Eyre, whose triumphant “Reader, I married him” also marks her dual victory: she wins both love and authorship.
The women of Sex and the City fare differently. Their New York — lined with boutiques instead of bookshops — often turns literature into décor. Yet both Gissing’s and HBO’s heroines share something deeper: they navigate the city through stories, balancing ambition, friendship, and loneliness on the page or the screen.
Writing, Gissing reminds us, isn’t glamorous. It’s dull, isolating, and often economically hopeless. But it keeps you alive. It gives shape to the chaos. In the “valley of the shadow of books,” failure is constant — but so is the flicker of creative survival.
In the end, New Grub Street’s Marian Yule, cast out of London, lands a job in a provincial library. When she shares news of her latest publication with her ex-lover’s sister, she does it without bitterness. Like Isabella Whitney centuries before her — and like Carrie Bradshaw after her — she keeps writing.
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