George Meredith: 142 books

For its time, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) had a sexual frankness about adultery, illegitimacy, and seduction that had a disastrous effect on Meredith’s reputation as a novelist for many years. Meredith defied Victorian convention and expectations in his three-part story of Richard Feverel’s...

Published in 1885 and immediately popular, Diana of the Crossways was Meredith’s first successful novel.  It tells the story of a beautiful, witty, and headstrong Irish woman, Diana, who is trapped in an unhappy and loveless marriage.  Fashionable London is scandalized when Diana leaves her husband...

Meredith was purported to have said, “he is all of us” of the main character in his most enduring novel, The Egoist, published in 1879. The novel tells the “tragicomical” story of Sir Willoughby Pattene’s single-minded pursuit of a marriageable woman.  Sympathy, however, lies with Clara Middleton,...

Contents: 1. Use Preview To See Table of Contents Inside Also available: The Complete Harvard Classics Collection (51 Volumes + The Harvard Classic Shelf Of Fiction) 50 Masterpieces You Have To Read Before You Die (Golden Deer Classics)

This Essay was first published in ‘The New Quarterly Magazine’ for April 1877.

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. Credulity is not wooed...

We are to make acquaintance with some serious damsels, as this English generation knows them, and at a season verging upon May. The ladies of Brookfield, Arabella, Cornelia, and Adela Pole, daughters of a flourishing City-of-London merchant, had been told of a singular thing: that in the neighbouring...

A procession of schoolboys having to meet a procession of schoolgirls on the Sunday's dead march, called a walk, round the park, could hardly go by without dropping to a hum in its chatter, and the shot of incurious half-eyes the petticoated creatures—all so much of a swarm unless you stare at them...

Like a breeze through midnight harpstrings

Mean ends for men who what they are would be:

Everybody has heard of the beautiful Countess of Cressett, who was one of the lights of this country at the time when crowned heads were running over Europe, crying out for charity's sake to be amused after their tiresome work of slaughter: and you know what a dread they have of moping. She was famous...