George Meredith
1828–1909
Biography
George Meredith (1828–1909) wrote verse and fiction in England through most of the Victorian period. He began as a poet, at first under the influence of Keats, and only slowly came to be known for his novels. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, which appeared in 1859, unsettled the literary circles of its day, and The Egoist (1879) is the book of his that readers most admire now. Diana of the Crossways (1885) brought him the widest popularity of his lifetime.
Meredith was known for probing the minds of his characters and for setting private lives against wider social change. His prose is compressed and knotted, with sudden leaps of thought, so that even his admirers often found it hard going. He was also a generous friend to younger writers; Stevenson and Gissing, among others, owed him encouragement. He was put forward for the Nobel Prize in Literature on several occasions, but the prize never came to him.
The Amazing Marriage, a novel first published in 1895, is the book of his that this site holds. It shows the lighter and more satirical side of Meredith, which is easy to overlook beside the intensity of Richard Feverel and The Egoist. Readers who know him only through those harder books may find it a useful way in to his comic gift.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
The Amazing Marriage
by George Meredith
Carinthia Kirby, a girl raised abroad, marries the extravagant Lord Fleetwood, and the marriage is a mystery to them both. George Meredith's last complete novel, 1895. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its period as written; the Book Guide explains these words where…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.