Word: merediths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When his sharp-tongued wife protested against their dolorous way of life, he retaliated savagely, and soon their love match degenerated into the biting, scratching partnership that Meredith described in the poem Modern Love...
Such a man, Meredith himself believed, can only be one whose emotions are under the complete control of the intellect. Meredith, more akin to Shaw than to Dickens and Trollope, became an intellectual comedian whose life was one long perpetration of jokes against his haughty self. His Ordeal of Richard Feverel sardonically recounted the misadventures of a proper Victorian young gentleman brought up in almost complete ignorance of sex. The hero of The Egoist was a young baronet of such absurd self-love that he delayed his marriage (and lost the girl) worrying that she might remarry if he died...
...George Meredith was hardly the man to translate his own exact misadventures into literal print, but he had enough of his own, at least, to stimulate imagination. One of them began when he married the daughter of Satirist Thomas Love Peacock and settled down to earn a living writing poetry...
When his first volume left him poorer than before, he turned reluctantly to fiction. For 30 years thereafter he slogged away, writing novels that nobody could understand and consoling himself with poems that only a few poets wanted to read. Typically, even George Meredith's everyday letters were written in a syntax so impenetrable that they needed a second or third reading...
...Meredith ended the farce by eloping with a portrait painter. Meredith worked on alone for a while, a crusty grass widower. He became a reader for the publishing firm of Chapman & Hall, promptly turned down one of history's biggest bestsellers, Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne, His acceptance of such newcomers as Thomas Hardy and George Gissing never attained the fame of his rejection slips, which turned back Samuel Butler's Erewhon ("Will not do"), and Shaw's early novels, Cashel Byron's Profession and Immaturity...