The English novelist and poet George Meredith (1828-1909) concentrated on detailed character development and witty intellectual discussion. His narrative style is often highly metaphorical, allusive, and aphoristic. George Meredith was born on Feb. 12,...

Between 1856 and 1895, George Meredith published fifteen novels as well as long short stories or novellas, taking as his special subject the instability of human relationships within a sharply conceived but usually arbitrary social context. As a...

Between 1856 and 1895, George Meredith published fifteen novels and a number of long short stories or novellas, taking as his special subject the instability of human relationships within a sharply conceived but usually arbitrary social context. As a...

Another biography of Thomas Hardy, and, it seems a good one, by Claire Tomalin. But what is it about Hardy that so attracts biographers? There have been a good few of them, even in the last quarter century. Indeed Hardy ('little Tommy Hardy', as...

The Amazing Victorian: A Life of George Meredith. Mervyn Jones. Constable. [pounds]20.00. 311 pages. ISBN 0-09-479810-7. Such is the persuasiveness of Mervyn Jones's presentation of George Meredith as a modern novelist and poet astonishingly ahead of his time, that one may speculate...

In the following essay, Harris argues that Meredith's poetry is often misread when critics attempt to analyze it as a coherent body of work. Harris identifies Meredith's “Earth” poems of the 1880s as some of his most successful, aside from Modern Love, which stands apart from both Meredith's corpus and most Victorian poetry as an original expression of love's hypocritical sentimentality.

In the following essay, Lucas faults Meredith for inept rhyming, excessive grandiloquence, and generally faulty writing. Lucas frames his criticism as an attempt to take Meredith seriously as a poet, arguing that his successes cannot be properly valued unless his failings are clearly understood.

In the following excerpt, Bernstein identifies Meredith's debt to Romanticism, focusing on the poem “Hymn to Colour.” Bernstein emphasizes Meredith's Romantic sympathies to demonstrate that the poem is not merely philosophical, but also sensual.