George Meredith

George Meredith (1829-1909) was a novelist and poet. In this 1963 study, Phyllis Bartlett underlines Meredith's essential modernity. His poetry, with its preoccupation with the vitality and fire of nature, owes much to Wordsworth, but it also anticipates D. H. Lawrence. His novels are remarkable for their psychological insight and for their awareness of the iniquities of Victorian sexual morality. Yet his work is never morbid, as Bartlett emphasizes; the searching analysis of human relationships is accompanied by humour and irony, for Meredith believed deeply in "the laughter of men and women in concert".