SOURCE: A review of The House of Cobwebs, in The Academy, Vol. 70, No. 1776, May 19, 1906, p. 479.

In the following review, the critic offers a favorable assessment of The House of Cobwebs.

We are not of those whose pleasure in a man's work is necessarily increased by an intimate acquaintance with the circumstances of his life, yet it were idle to deny the power of that faculty (none the less irresistible for being frequently unconscious) which some writers have of exciting their readers' curiosity, and we well remember wondering, on taking up a book of George Gissing's for the first time, what manner of man this might be who could write with such bitter suavity, with such delicate irony, of a milieu which he appeared to know well and thoroughly to detest. The few hard, essential facts which invested Gissing's career with a not quite ordinary pathos are now well...