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“... New York Review Books has reprinted a clever little book, published in 1972, about the first Mrs George Meredith, which is nothing so crude as a blow struck in battle: it’s a poignant needling, deflating the male creative genius – not ungenerously – and providing yet another plausible case of a wife abused by posterity. When Diane Johnson was ...”

“... The two most interesting letters in this selection are not by Meredith: a fact suggestive of the Meredithian tendency to evade evidence or embodiment of a personal sort, and disappear into the airier world of ideas about him – his own or those of others. His personality, like that of his creations, is of a gaseous nature ...”

“... they are incoherent enough to constitute a problem is always going to be the nice question. Take George Meredith. No one can regard him as a significant thinker now – almost all of his work is long out of print – but for a few decades at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th he was the cutting edge, a highbrow’s highbrow, and he ...”

“... It has always been​ said of George Meredith that, in the words of Oscar Wilde, ‘as a novelist he can do anything except tell a story.’ ‘Regarding narrative,’ J.B. Priestley declared, ‘every novel that Meredith wrote is not merely faulty but downright bad.’ On Meredith’s centenary in 1928, Arnold Bennett summarised the problem: ‘He wanders vaguely around ...”

“... No one reads George Meredith any more. His novels are thought to be brainy and obscure, his difficulty is seen as suspect. In the four weeks ending 22 February, according to Nielsen BookScan, 1359 people in Britain bought a copy of Middlemarch; of the noteworthy novels published in the same decade, Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes sold 182 copies; Meredith’s The Egoist sold nine ...”

“... more precise theory and practice of language than the on-going bustle of narrative will allow for. George Meredith, to take a good example, plays havoc with the expected sequence of events, expanding and contracting particular elements of the plot so that we can feel the sinews of narrative creaking and cracking under the strain. Then he turns round and ...”

“... work with ink and ochre to make them look something they were not. In Ackroyd’s Chatterton, George Meredith says to Henry Wallis: ‘There are no words to stamp the indefinite thing.’ Only when ‘steyned with Goere, the Harte of Warre is seen’. Learning and nature, forgery and originality, stand in paradoxical relation in Chatterton’s ...”

“... If a 19th-century paternity exists for this novel, it is surely in the mannered accomplishments of George Meredith, who is credited in passing with being the most recent novelist to be studied in the Oxford English School. A Villa in France has that that beguiling property – so eminently characteristic of ...”

“... quarrels with Bradlaugh. A book of poems is published and brings the acquaintance of Rossetti and Meredith, but lacking a dinner suit he cannot meet such people as an equal. He suffers insomnia and stomach pains. The only journals which pay him cease publication. Six weeks of heavy drinking, shop-lifting, jail, homelessness, lead to a sudden death. The ...”

“... to those who know a Karoo farm’. It was published in 1883, partly on the recommendation of George Meredith, and with its great success Olive Schreiner entered on her passionate dialogue with the world at large. Of all Lyndall’s confused perceptions, the clearest is: ‘When I’m strong, I’ll hate everything that has power, and help everything ...”

“... to become contagious.’ This confession comes at the end of Delany’s engaging new biography of George Gissing, and suggests the special difficulty of spending long periods in the company of the English novelist most known for the relentless pessimism of his novels and the self-destructive tendencies of his life. The dean of Gissing studies, Pierre ...”

“... thought to have provoked lifelong neurosis about sex. The Companion does not record that George Meredith was instrumental in getting The Story of an African Farm published (poor old Meredith also loses his credit for helping Ouida and Marie Corelli into print). In her later career in England, the Companion ...”

“... He was trying, sometimes precisely and sometimes with unbelievable slackness, to tell us, like George Meredith in his day, what he knew about ‘modern love’, and to find narrative forms that suited his slippery subject. The point is that the slackness may be as important as the precision; and that there are whole reaches of the novels that are ...”

“... any other action open to him, is very persuasive. A brisk analysis of Felix Holt the Radical shows George Eliot’s own radicalism faltering after the opening chapters and sums up the book’s weakness in a sentence: ‘By disarming Felix as an effective moral agent, George Eliot commits the blunder of disarming him as an ...”

“... and least reliable fictional characters: Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove (1902) and George Darrow in The Reef (1912). Like other biographies tracking the ‘invisible lives’ of writers’ lovers – Claire Tomalin’s Life of Dickens’s Ellen Ternan, or the now-forgotten but interesting Portrait of Zélide (Benjamin Constant’s mistress, Mme ...”