Ah, la vie! 
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Lytton Strachey loved reading letters, including the published kind, but after glancing at a few sentences of George Meredith’s correspondence in 1912, he felt ‘so nauseated’, he told Virginia Woolf, that he shut the book at once:
Is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? They seem to me to be a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites; but perhaps really there is a baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-great-grandchildren, as we have discovered the charm of Donne, who seemed intolerable to the 18th century. Only I don’t believe it.
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Ruth Bernard Yeazell is the Chace Family Professor of English at Yale. Her new book is Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel.
Other articles by this contributor:
Self-Made Man · Edith Wharton’s Domestic Arrangements
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