George Meredith Popular Books

George Meredith Biography & Facts

George Meredith (12 February 1828 – 18 May 1909) was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. At first, his focus was poetry, influenced by John Keats among others, but Meredith gradually established a reputation as a novelist. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) briefly scandalised Victorian literary circles. Of his later novels, the most enduring is The Egoist (1879), though in his lifetime his greatest success was Diana of the Crossways (1885). His novels were innovative in their attention to characters' psychology, and also portrayed social change. His style, in both poetry and prose, was noted for its syntactic complexity; Oscar Wilde likened it to "chaos illumined by brilliant flashes of lightning". Meredith was an encourager of other novelists, as well as an influence on them; among those to benefit were Robert Louis Stevenson and George Gissing. Meredith was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times. Life Early years, education and first marriage Meredith was born at 73 High Street, Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, the only child of Augustus Urmston Meredith and his wife Jane Eliza (née Macnamara). The name Meredith is Welsh, and he would describe himself as "half Irish and half Welsh" (on his mother's and father's sides, respectively). He was proud of his Welsh origins, and such pride is evident in his novels. His biographer Lionel Stevenson explains that Meredith's paternal grandfather, Melchizedek, would sometimes "boast eloquently of his princely forebears", but "between his immediate forebears and the legendary Welsh princes of seven centuries before, the history of the family remains obscure." Augustus Meredith was, as Melchizedek Meredith had been before him, a naval outfitter, and among his employees was James Watson Gieve. Jane died when her son was five, and the outfitting business failed, with Augustus declared bankrupt in November 1838. He moved to London and in July 1839 remarried – his second wife being the family's former housekeeper, Matilda Buckett. George Meredith was educated in Southsea until 1840, when a legacy from his mother's sister, Anna, made it possible for him to attend a boarding school in Lowestoft, Suffolk. In August 1842 he was sent to the Moravian School in Neuwied, near Coblenz, where he remained until the spring of 1844; Lionel Stevenson argues that the experience instilled his "impatience towards sham and servility, contempt for conceit, admiration for courage, and devotion to candid and rational forthrightness". By 1845 it was planned that he would be articled to a solicitor, Richard Charnock of Paternoster Row, and he was duly articled in February 1846, shortly before his eighteenth birthday. But he abandoned the legal profession for journalism and poetry, taking lodgings in Pimlico. Drawn to literary circles, Meredith collaborated with Edward Gryffydh Peacock, son of Thomas Love Peacock, in publishing a privately circulated literary magazine, the Monthly Observer. One of the contributors was Edward Peacock's sister Mary Ellen Nicolls. Described by the artist William Holman Hunt as "a dashing type of horsewoman who attracted much notice", Mary was the widow of a naval officer, Lieutenant Edward Nicolls, who in 1844 had drowned while attempting to rescue a man under his command. In August 1849 Meredith married Mary, at St George's, Hanover Square. At the time of the marriage, Meredith was 21 years old; she was 28 and had a five-year-old daughter by Lieutenant Nicolls (born after his death). Augustus Meredith was not present at the wedding, having emigrated to South Africa in April of that year. First books Meredith collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, in an 1851 volume, Poems. Dedicated to his father-in-law Thomas Love Peacock, "with the profound admiration and affectionate respect of his son-in-law", it attracted the interest of Tennyson, who wrote Meredith an admiring letter, expressing the desire to meet, though their first encounter was awkward and left Meredith convinced of the elder poet's "conceit". A review by William Michael Rossetti likened Meredith to "a kind of limited Keats", "a seeing or sensuous poet" possessing "warmth of emotion". The Merediths' circumstances were precarious, and Mary had more than one miscarriage before in 1853 giving birth to a son, Arthur Gryffydh. At the time the couple were living with her father in Lower Halliford (today part of Shepperton). Following the birth, Peacock rented a house for them, across the village green from his home. Fatherhood heightened Meredith's belief that he must press ahead with his writing career, resulting in what would eventually be his first substantial work of prose fiction, The Shaving of Shagpat. An allegorical Arabian fantasy, it was written in imitation of "the style and manner of the Oriental story-tellers", but sprang "from no Eastern source". The book attracted little notice when published, in 1856, though it was praised by George Eliot for its "poetical genius". The following year he published Farina, subtitled "A Legend of Cologne", a work in the comic-grotesque vein that was described by The Athenaeum's critic as "a full-blooded specimen of the nonsense of Genius" and a "lively, audacious piece of extravaganza". George Eliot, in The Westminster Review, called it "an original and an entertaining book", but it inevitably suffered from her reviewing it alongside Madame Bovary and Barchester Towers. End of first marriage The Death of Chatterton, a notable painting by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis (1830–1916), for which Meredith served as the model, was exhibited in 1856. Mary and Wallis grew close and became lovers. In 1857, she fell pregnant to him and in April 1858 gave birth to a son, Harold, who was later known as Felix Wallis. The relationship with Wallis however did not last; having spent some of 1858 with him in Capri, she returned to England with Harold, and from then on moved frequently. She died three years later, of kidney failure, a few months after moving to Grotto Cottage, Oatlands Park, Weybridge. Meredith was by this time living in Chelsea, where he kept rooms in Hobury Street and often had Arthur in his care. He did not attend Mary's funeral; neither did Henry Wallis or her father. Meredith's first major novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, emerged from his experience of the collapse of his marriage and shocked many readers with its sexual frankness. The collection of sonnets entitled Modern Love (1862) also traces the decline of a marriage and has been described by Dorothy Mermin as "a curiosity of Victorian literature" and "a point of intersection between Victorian poetry and the Victorian novel"; "in a very real sense novelistic", it is notable for its "psychological realism" and "extreme subjectivity". In 1861 he published Evan Harrington, a novel which deals with class, manners and mimicry. It upset his father, living at the time in Cape Town, who comp.... Discover the George Meredith popular books. Find the top 100 most popular George Meredith books.