George Meredith

Meredith, George (1828-1909), English Victorian poet and novelist, whose novels are noted for their wit, brilliant dialogue, and aphoristic quality of language. Meredith 's novels are also distinguished by psychological studies of character and a highly subjective view of life that, far ahead of his time, regarded women as truly the equals of men. His best known works are The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and The Egoist (1879).

Meredith was born February 12, 1828, in Portsmouth. He was educated at Portsmouth and at the Moravian school in Neuwied, Germany. He began his career as a journalist. His first book of poetry (1851) received the praise of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, but his first major novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), was banned as immoral. His sonnet sequence Modern Love is generally considered his best poetic work. Emilia in England (afterward called Sandra Belloni) was published in 1864 and Rhoda Fleming in 1865.

When war between Austria and Italy broke out in 1866, Meredith went to Italy as a war correspondent. He expressed his sympathy with the cause of Italian independence in his next book, Vittoria (1867), a sequel to Emilia in England. In 1871 he published The Adventures of Harry Richmond, a romantic novel. His Beauchamp's Career (1876) largely concerned English politics.

The next two novels of consequence, The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885) marked the beginning of Meredith's acceptance by a wider reading public and a more favourable reception by critics. Both are comedies, full of Meredithian wit and brilliant dialogue and notable for women characters who prove their right to be accepted as individuals, equal with men, rather than puppets. In The Egoist the enemy is egoism, and the egoist is tested by a succession of ordeals before joining the ranks of humanity. While that novel is concerned with the dangers of wrong choice before marriage, Diana is the first of a series of studies of mismating in marriage. Diana herself is a memorable character of spirit and brains, although Meredith is less successful in persuading readers that she could naively be guilty of a grave breach of confidence. In both novels, however, the men that Meredith approves of and hands the heroines over to are rather flat and uninteresting.

After publication of these two novels Meredith achieved critical acclaim in Britain and the U.S. In 1905 he received the Order of Merit. Among his other works are the novels Evan Harrington (1860), One of Our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont and His Aminta (1894), and The Amazing Marriage (1895) and the volumes of verse A Reading of Earth (1888), A Reading of Life (1901), and Last Poems (1909).

Meredith died at his home near Box Hill, Surrey, on May 18, 1909. The influence of Meredith on the novel has been indirect rather than direct. Although his highly personal style was incapable of imitation, his extensive use of interior monologue anticipated the stream-of-consciousness technique of James Joyce and others. Moreover, with George Eliot he was creating the psychological novel and thus was an important link between his 18th-century predecessors and 19th- and 20th-century followers. Among later novelists influenced by him the Marxist critic Jack Lindsay cites George Robert Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson; and the writer and critic J.B. Priestley points to Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster.

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