During his long writing career, from the 1850s into the early twentieth century, George Meredith moved from obscurity to the status of Grand Old Man of Letters. Over the last 150 years his reputation has suffered from peaks and troughs: the adulation that he enjoyed by the end of his life was superseded by an equally strong rejection. He was, it appears, too Victorian for the modernists but neither did his work fit him for entry into Leavis's morally determined “Great Tradition”. The 1970s saw a brief revival of interest and it is from this period that the most recent biographical studies derive: Diane Johnson's
Lesser Lives(1972) delves into Meredith's first marriage to the ill-fated Mary Ellen Nicolls and 1977 saw the publication of a full-scale biography of the writer by David…
3815 words
Citation: Zlosnik, Sue. "George Meredith". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 September 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3086, accessed 23 November 2024.]
