Critics are always trying to rescuscitate George Meredith, explaining with patience, learning, and obdurate fortitude that his novels are unfairly neglected. They may be neglected (well, they are neglected), but "unfairly" is a matter of opinion. I have begun many volumes of Meredith, but I have fin

I can do no better than to quote this unsigned appreciation from the New York Times over a hundred years ago: "There has often been genuine exhilaration in battling with a story by George Meredith. One has felt, in the difficult task of reading it with comprehension, as if he were walking over a bad

This is a wonderful yet neglected novel; those who enjoy fiction by George Eliot or Charles Dickens would like it.

Reading the first 150 pages was like swimming in jelly. Then suddenly the novel came to life and I couldn't put it down. Don't be put off by Meredith's having based it on a real person - he may have used Caroline Norton as inspiration, but of course there is no actual affair, no children involved, a

Even though the book's more than a century old, this's some of the most beautiful, sophisticated and original prose that one can encounter. Content doesn't matter when it is art for art's sake.

George Meredith is brilliant. I have in mind, for starters, the way he distributes attention among his characters’ psychologies, consciousnesses, experiences. Witness the earliest evidence of his roving narratorial presence: the intermingling of dialogue with Redwood’s interior monologue during Dian

Peter Ackroyd's "Dan Leno" includes a lot of scenes in the Reading Room of the British Library - I don't know how much historical liberty has to be taken to find a morning where Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde and George Gissing were all sitting there at the same time. Anyway, it was either that book or his

Lo stile dell'autore è decisamente maschile: serioso,intricato, fastidiosamente elusivo nei passaggi cruciali; e il primo capitolo sembra addirittura scritto con l'intento di scoraggiare i potenziali lettori. Ma i personaggi sono affascinanti, e la storia è di quelle che appassionano: una giovane e

It took a while to get through Meredith's slow, fussy, didactic and sometimes turgid prose, especially the first chapter. But what a story, when you finally get to it! Diana of the Crossways is a unique heroine, impetuous, headstrong, vibrant, passionate and in every way in trouble in a Victorian so

This is one of the greatest early feminist novels [so is Meredith's THE EGOIST:], and Meredith's witty, satirical style is among the greatest [along with Hugo and Faulkner:].