One hundred years ago Meredith was considered the equal of Thomas Hardy but is now almost forgotten. His novels are read only by academics and his poetry by hardly anyone. Perhaps to compensate, he has always been blessed by shrewd and sympathetic biographers and critics. To a list containing Jack Lindsay, J.B. Priestley, Siegfried Sassoon, Virginia Woolf and Gore Vidal, we may now add Mervyn Jones, for this excellent short introduction has formidable strengths. Jones is good at relating the novels to their historical context and at identifying the currents in Victorian culture which permeate Meredith's work. He is also a perceptive reader of texts, drawing our attention to the perennial snake imagery in the work, for example, or the pacific Meredith's odd obsession with duels.
The notorious "difficulty" of Meredith's novels arise from an ambition he shared with his father-in-law Thomas Love Peacock and which he once expressed as follows: "Narrative is nothing. It is the mere vehicle of philosophy. The interest is in the idea which action serves to illustrate." In other words, plot is subservient to character and storytelling to ideology. This "modernistic" view, an alien one in the era of Dickens and Thackeray, explains why Meredith had poor sales in his day and will always be a minority taste.
Then there was the wordiness and obscurity. Henry James said of Meredith's novels (though this was a bit rich coming from James, of all people) that they were full of "extravagant verbiage, of airs and graces, of phrases and attitudes, of obscurities and ????????????????alembications." Jones remarks that reading Meredith, as with Carlyle, can often seem like wading through German.
Meredith wanted to write a novel of ideas, as Tolstoy, Melville and Dostoevsky had. But he was also a poet, and poet-novelists always confuse people, as the examples of Scott, Stevenson, Hardy and D.H. Lawrence show. Additionally, his novels have strong affinities with drama, and some of his admirers have suggested that his true milieu would have been the Elizabethan or Jacobean theatre. He worked largely from the imagination, for his career - private life apart - was uneventful and was largely the Grub Street existence of the professional writer who cannot find the elusive mass readership. Jones makes the point that many of Meredith's characters are aristocrats convincingly portrayed but that Meredith knew nothing personally of England's oligarchs.
Meredith's disastrous marriage to Mary Ellen Nicholls was the most important external event in his life. Wed at twenty-one to a widow six years his senior, he found himself in conflict with a talented strong-willed female who was in competition with him for the same space. Both he and Mary were hot-tempered, combative, contentious and quick to take offence. After some years of terrible scenes and quarrels, Mary cut the Gordian knot by running off with the painter Henry Wallis, who shortly afterwards discarded her.
The experience of being a cuckolded Victorian male should have made Meredith a misogynist, but instead it deepened his sympathy for women. More than any other writer of his sex and era, Meredith deserves the tag "feminist," for his fiction is full of strong women who are the exact opposite of victims. By common consent, his empathy with women was even more acute than that of Henry James, Stevenson or D.H. Lawrence. Some critics go so far as to say that he would have been happier as a woman. Just as Flaubert said of Madame Bovary: "Emma, c'est moi," so, Jones suggests, Meredith might have claimed that he was Diana of the Crossways, the Irish heroine of his most successful and most popular novel, the only work in his oeuvre to reach the wide readership he craved. This is a praiseworthy volume on a neglected author, overdue for revaluation.
Frank McLynn is a biographer whose recent works include Robert Louis Stevenson and Napoleon
The last sketch of Meredith. By the French artist Noel Dorville