George Meredith (1828 - 1909)

Meredith is certainly a minor chracter is this section. If he does appear, you see only one or two questions, most likely on The Egoist.

The Egoist

George Meredith’s 1879 novel The Egoist is one of the major comic novels in the language. In telling the story of Clara Middleton’s struggle to extricate herself from her engagement to Sir Willoughby Patterne, the novel presents an ironic subversion of texts that had shaped the pattern of Victorian femininity. Clearly situated as an apparently realist novel in an English country house, this novel embodies in its language the monstrosity of an unequal relationship between man and woman as endorsed by the prevailing attitudes of the time. Clara has been pressured into an engagement with the eligible Sir Willoughby and the dynamic of the novel is carried by her dawning realisation of what marriage to him would mean and her increasingly urgent attempts to gain her freedom.