MEREDITH, GEORGE. - English novelist and poet, b. at Portsmouth on 13 Feb. 1828, d. on 19 May 1909 at Box Hill (Surrey). He married the daughter of the novelist T. S. Peacock, already a widow, and the marriage was very unhappy, ending in a divorce and later in the woman's suicide. From this sad affair was born Modern Love, a series of fifty sonnets regarded by some modern critics as the writer's masterpiece for its psychological acuteness and technical boldness. As a novelist and as a poet, M. is certainly more brilliant but also less solid and less profound than his contemporary Thomas Hardy.
To few writers can the label "cerebral" be more justly applied, although, unlike James, he is not an innovator of narrative technique. New to the narrative rhythm of his works are the abuse of epigrams and maxims, the ostentation of offhandedness and unconventionality; M.'s dialectic is certainly admirable, but, not being applied to the profound problems of human life, it proves somewhat disproportionate. The author repudiated every form of Christianity, contenting himself with replacing it with a vague idolatry of nature and of life in the open air and with rather insubstantial ideologies, celebrating the emancipation of women in the name of a progress not defined in concrete terms, and without really confronting social problems. To the "comic spirit," which he regarded as a reagent and a leaven in the novelist's work, he attributed an exaggerated and indeed cathartic function and, although he employed it with great skill, he made an excessive and too undisguised use of it in his work (for, unlike Dickens, he was not a born humorist) and remains a writer read and admired by few. Among his major novels are remembered The Egoist (1871), which is his masterpiece, Vittoria (1866), which is set in the Milanese revolution of '48, Diana of the Crossways (1855) on the emancipation of women.
Bibliography3 works
Augusto Guidi