The Paying Guest

A suburban couple take in a paying guest to help with the rent, and she is a young woman of energy, ambition and no manners whatever — after which nothing in the house is safe. Gissing's academic career ended at eighteen when he was caught stealing to support a young prostitute he married; this short 1895 comedy is the one time he let himself be funny about the lower-middle class he usually wrote as tragedy. Fifty-nine plates of painting from 1813 to 1928, among them works by William Rothenstein and Philip de László, catch the same comedy of manners in the drawing rooms, gardens and landscapes of the age.