In 1897, at age nineteen, American Brian Boru Dunne was an aspiring journalist, who chanced to meet the Englishman George Gissing at the height of his career as a novelist. He was somewhat awed, but not unduly intimidated, by the renowned writer, and his vigorous personality drew Gissing into many frank and unguarded conversations. Stored away until after Dunne's death, his fully wrought memoirs of these conversations and the description of their meetings are the essence of this volume.

With Gissing in Italy is the only portrait we have of the quotidian life, both trivial and important, happy and sad, of George Gissing at this point in his career, observed with the eye of a journalist, by a young man with no other concern than an accurate and lively painting of his own life with an eminent English writer living abroad, freed from the misery of his domestic life.