SOURCE: Fletcher, Pauline. “‘Trifles light as air’ in Meredith's Modern Love.” Victorian Poetry 34, no. 1 (spring 1996): 87-99.

In the following essay, Fletcher focuses on the parallels between Modern Love and Shakespeare's Othello in order to highlight Meredith's development of psychology and character. In this essay, the critic refers to the individual sonnets comprising Modern Love as sections of the larger poem.

The most widely accepted reading of Modern Love is that, as the editors of Victorian Poetry and Poetics claim, it is “in general a fictional interpretation of the poet's own marital experience,” and that it involves four major players: the married couple, “the man with whom the wife has a love affair, and the woman … with whom the husband takes up.”¹ When interpretations enter the introductory or footnote material of widely used anthologies, they might be said to have attained canonical status. Not all critics, of course, have...