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In this volume of selected letters of the novelist and poet George Meredith (1828-1909), the editor has included letters with such figures as Virginia Woolf (Stephen at the time), Paul Valery, Thomas Carlyle, Madame Daudet, Edmund Gosse, Alfred Tennyson, James Thomson and many others. The letters, most of them previously unpublished, reveal the myriad world of Meredith's life and thought. The selection includes the two earliest letters extant written by Meredith just after he had left Neuwied, his school in Germany. It also includes Meredith's first letter to Chapman & Hall concerning his project for the publication of his first volume of verse, and another Meredith wrote to the same publisher in connection with a cookery book which his first wife, Mary Ellen Peacock, was preparing for publication.
George Meredith: The Life and Writing of an Alteregoist is not only a critical biography of the Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith but also a portrait of the novel in the later nineteenth century. Interweaving analysis of Meredith’s novels and poems with discussion of his life, Richard Cronin focuses primarily on the books Meredith read and wrote—arguing that novels by the end of the nineteenth century were shaped as much by the reading as by the experience of their writers. Cronin places Meredith’s novels in relation to the work of his contemporaries including Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing. Organized thematically, the book explores Meredith’s personal side—including his hostility to biography, his origins as the son of a tailor, his marriages—as well as his reading habits, and the prose style that is the most complete expression of his strange but compelling personality.
George Meredith was a lyrical yet searingly honest poet, and an influential novelist whose fiction distilled, contributed to and animated the major debates of the Victorian age. He became at once an arbiter of taste in his own times, and a trailblazer for modernism. In many ways an extraordinary, larger-than-life figure, he has always had his admirers, and critics have continued to be drawn to the biographical, socio-political, scientific and experimental aspects of his oeuvre. Some of his works, including the sonnets ofModern Love, his 'Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit', and novels like The Egoist, have attained the status of classics. The present study focuses on such works, putting them in context to show how innovatively this versatile writer shaped and reshaped his material, and how powerfully his inimitable voice still resonates with (and challenges) us in the twenty first century.
In The Egoist, his comic masterpiece, George Meredith takes the traditional marriage plot of English domestic fiction and turns it on its head. The novel describes the repeated and disastrous courtships of Sir Willoughby Patterne, the egoist of the title. Three women become engaged to Sir Willoughby, but, despite his aristocratic arrogance and the manipulative power of his wealth, each is finally able to see him more clearly than he sees himself. The introduction to this edition provides context for the novel from Meredith’s own life, his theory of comedy, and his understanding of Darwinian thought. The appendices include reviews, other writing on comedy, and historical documents on women, sexual politics, and the theory of evolution.
Focusing on works by George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, Alice Crossley examines the emergence of adolescence in the mid-Victorian period as a distinct form of experience. Adolescence, Crossley shows, appears as a discrete category of identity that draws on but is nonetheless distinguishable from other masculine types. Important more as a stage of psychological awareness and maturation than as a period of biological youth, Crossley argues that the plasticity of male adolescence provides Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope with opportunities for self-reflection and social criticism while also working as a paradigm for narrative and imaginative inquiry about motivation, egotism, emotional and physical relationships, and the possibilities of self-creation. Adolescence emerges as a crucial stage of individual growth, adopted by these authors in order to reflect more fully on cultural and personal anxieties about manliness. The centrality of male youth in these authors’ novels, Crossley demonstrates, repositions age-consciousness as an integral part of nineteenth-century debates about masculine heterogeneity.
During a period when the idea of fatherhood was in flux and individual fathers sought to regain a cohesive collective identity, debates related to a father’s authority were negotiated and resolved through competing documents. Melissa Shields Jenkins analyzes the evolution of patriarchal authority in nineteenth-century culture, drawing from extra-literary and non-narrative source material as well as from novels. Arguing that Victorian novelists reinvent patriarchy by recourse to conduct books, biography, religious manuals, political speeches, and professional writing in the fields of history and science, Jenkins offers interdisciplinary case studies of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Meredith, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Samuel Butler, and Thomas Hardy. Jenkins’s book contributes to our understanding of the part played by fathers in the Victorian cultural imagination, and sheds new light on the structures underlying the Victorian novel.
Stevenson’s brooding historical romance demonstrates his most abiding theme—the elemental struggle between good and evil—as it unfolds against a hauntingly beautiful Scottish landscape, amid the fierce loyalties and violent enmities that characterized Scottish history. When two brothers attempt to split their loyalties between the warring factions of the 1745 Jacobite rising, one family finds itself tragically divided. Stevenson’s remarkably vivid characterizations create an acutely moving, psychologically complex work; as Andrea Barrett points out in her Introduction, “The brothers’ characters, not the historical facts, shape the drama.” This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes illustrations reproduced from the original edition.
The scholar Charles Whibley was born in 1859 and died in 1930, straddling the end of the Victorian age, the new century, and the Great War and its aftermath. After completing his studies at Cambridge, his early journalistic experiences were with the critic, poet and editor William Ernest Henley, known for his mentoring of young writers on the Scots, later National Observer, and Whibley was to a great extent the mainstay of the journal. After his grounding with Henley, he moved to Paris for a few years as the correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette. Here, he became friends with Paul Valéry, Stéphane Mallarmé and Marcel Schwob, and married Whistler’s sister-in-law Ethel Birnie Philip in July 1895. While in Paris he wrote for Blackwood’s Magazine and was an advisor for Fisher Unwin’s Library of Literary History. Returning to England, Whibley became friends with Lord Northcliffe, Lady Cynthia Asquith, and later T. S. Eliot. The friendship with William Blackwood resulted in Whibley’s monthly “Musings without Method” from February 1900 to December 1929, a contribution which Eliot called “one of the best sustained pieces of literary journalism that I know in recent times”. Northcliffe was a close friend, as was Sir Frederick Macmillan of the publishing firm. From 1906 until October 1920, Whibley contributed a Saturday column in Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, and for many years was a reader for Macmillans. His friendship and infatuation with Cynthia Asquith lives strongly in his letters, although there is hardly any mention of his wife Ethel. Much of his literary work was with biographical essays of literary and political persons. After the death of Ethel in 1920, Whibley visited Brazil sending back reports to Cynthia Asquith. Whibley contributed to Eliot’s Criterion and also helped Eliot to acquire British citizenship. Apart from his continued journalism, Whibley worked as a consultant for the Royal Literary Fund later becoming a committee member. In 1927, he married his Goddaughter Philippa Raleigh. Whibley’s death in France in March 1930 robbed the literary world of his biography of W.E. Henley. Many of his letters deal with his literary work with the Macmillans, Blackwood’s Magazine, and his friendship with Cynthia Asquith, and in some letters to Northcliffe he parades his Tory views. He was a supporter of the Great War, though little appears in his letters.
This book examines the early publishing careers of three highly influential writers, Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett, and Arthur Conan Doyle.