MEREDITH, GEORGE. - English novelist and poet, b. at Portsmouth on 12 Feb. 1828, d. 19 May 1909 at Box Hill (Surrey). He married the daughter of the novelist T. S. Peacock, already widowed, and the marriage was very unhappy, ending in divorce and later in the woman’s suicide. From this tragic experience came *Modern Love*, a sequence of fifty sonnets regarded by some modern critics as the writer’s masterpiece for its psychological insight and technical daring. As a novelist and as a poet, M. is certainly more brilliant but also less solid and less profound than his contemporary Thomas Hardy.
Few writers more justly deserve the epithet “cerebral,” though unlike James he was not an innovator in narrative technique. What is new in the rhythm of his works is the abuse of epigrams and sententiae, the ostentation of ease and boldness; Meredith’s dialectic is certainly admirable, but since it is not applied to the profound problems of human life it seems somewhat disproportionate. The author rejected every form of Christianity, contenting himself with substituting a vague idolatry of nature and the open air and rather flimsy ideologies, celebrating women’s emancipation in the name of an undefined progress and without really confronting social issues. To the “comic spirit,” which he regarded as a reagent and leaven in the novelist’s work, he attributed an exaggerated and even cathartic function; though he employed it with great skill, he overused it and displayed it too openly in his work (for, unlike Dickens, he was not a born humorist), and he remains a writer read and admired by few. Among his major novels are *The Egoist* (1871), which is his masterpiece, *Vittoria* (1866), set during the Milanese revolution of 1848, and *Diana of the Crossways* (1885) on women’s emancipation.