What do you think?
Rate this book
Diana of the Crossways
After her unhappy marriage, we watch the beautiful and witty Diana as she is followed by a trail of suitors. Her sparkling repartee and the author's intellectualized philosophy give this novel unusual depth. Nine 90-minute cassettes and one 60.
365 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1885
29 people are currently reading
643 people want to read
About the author
George Meredith
1,554 books101 followersGeorge Meredith of Britain wrote novels, such as
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
(1859), and poetic works, including
Modern Love
(1862).
During the Victorian era, Meredith read law, and people articled him as a solicitor, but shortly after marrying Mary Ellen Nicolls, a 30-year-old widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, in 1849 at 21 years of age, he abandoned that profession for journalism.
He collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, into Poems, which was published to some acclaim in 1851. His wife left him and their five-year old son in 1858; she died three years later. Her departure was the inspiration for The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), his first "major novel." It was considered a breakthrough novel, but its sexual frankness caused a scandal and prevented it from being widely read.
As an advisor to publishers, Meredith is credited with helping Thomas Hardy start his literary career, and was an early associate of J. M. Barrie. Before his death, Meredith was honored from many quarters: he succeeded Lord Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors; in 1905 he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII.
His works include: The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), Farina (1857), Vittoria (1867) and The Egoist (1879). The Egoist is one of his most enduring works.
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
George^Meredith
During the Victorian era, Meredith read law, and people articled him as a solicitor, but shortly after marrying Mary Ellen Nicolls, a 30-year-old widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, in 1849 at 21 years of age, he abandoned that profession for journalism.
He collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, into Poems, which was published to some acclaim in 1851. His wife left him and their five-year old son in 1858; she died three years later. Her departure was the inspiration for The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), his first "major novel." It was considered a breakthrough novel, but its sexual frankness caused a scandal and prevented it from being widely read.
As an advisor to publishers, Meredith is credited with helping Thomas Hardy start his literary career, and was an early associate of J. M. Barrie. Before his death, Meredith was honored from many quarters: he succeeded Lord Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors; in 1905 he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII.
His works include: The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), Farina (1857), Vittoria (1867) and The Egoist (1879). The Egoist is one of his most enduring works.
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
George^Meredith
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
March 9, 2019
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 "Chatterton" that reminded me I had never actually read George Meredith.
Meredith strikes me as a quintessentially Victorian writer; no hint of modernism ever intrudes. He is noted as something of what passed for a feminist man at the time, speaking sympathetically of suffrage and so on. Diana is a character whose struggles against the societal expectations that she will have no ideas and not attempt to engage with men in the realm of politics or writing are depicted sympathetically.
She is also depicted as so attractive and intelligent that every man she meets either proposes marriage or makes some less gentlemanly overture. Among the latter is her best friend's husband, leading her to accept the first proposal that comes thereafter, making an unhappy marriage. According to the ground rules of the era, or at least this book, this puts her off limits and she can continue to visit her friend, unmolested. Fairly early on in the book, her hastily formed marriage breaks down, putting her in an anomalous position that guides the story.
However, ultimately her happiness seems to lie in finally finding the right man. And, we haven't mentioned the theme of the Irish, emotional children who thrive under their gentle but unyielding English masters. Diana herself is Irish, the best of her kind of course, and as a woman, held to a different standard.
Meredith's actual writing is head-spinning, extended metaphors that go on for pages, in equal measure impressive and prolix.
Meredith strikes me as a quintessentially Victorian writer; no hint of modernism ever intrudes. He is noted as something of what passed for a feminist man at the time, speaking sympathetically of suffrage and so on. Diana is a character whose struggles against the societal expectations that she will have no ideas and not attempt to engage with men in the realm of politics or writing are depicted sympathetically.
She is also depicted as so attractive and intelligent that every man she meets either proposes marriage or makes some less gentlemanly overture. Among the latter is her best friend's husband, leading her to accept the first proposal that comes thereafter, making an unhappy marriage. According to the ground rules of the era, or at least this book, this puts her off limits and she can continue to visit her friend, unmolested. Fairly early on in the book, her hastily formed marriage breaks down, putting her in an anomalous position that guides the story.
However, ultimately her happiness seems to lie in finally finding the right man. And, we haven't mentioned the theme of the Irish, emotional children who thrive under their gentle but unyielding English masters. Diana herself is Irish, the best of her kind of course, and as a woman, held to a different standard.
Meredith's actual writing is head-spinning, extended metaphors that go on for pages, in equal measure impressive and prolix.
September 16, 2015
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 society that sexualizes every relationship between a man and woman. The relationship between Diana and her best friend, Lady Emma, is physically affectionate and emotionally intense in a way we probably associate with romantic love. Read Vivian Gornick's wonderful essay on "The End of the Novel of Love" if you want to see what makes this book so special.
April 1, 2019
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 and winding road in the face of an obstinate east wind. Not a wholesome diversion for one in poor health; not a satisfying one for a lazy person. But a sound man or woman, with plenty of mental energy, has often derived genuine enjoyment of a very high quality from Meredith's books. There has been the most of them a strong tonic–something breezy, vigor-inspiring."
July 29, 2016
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.
June 26, 2019
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 Diana’s debut. Then, Redwood pursuing Diana to The Crossways, semi-delirious from cold and apparent disappointment, ostensibly, but actually wired into the narration, which lays bare the operation of mind in quasi-stream of consciousness! Add to that, Meredith’s penchant for miming Lady Wathin through free indirect discourse, and especially his mental shadowing of Percy after Diana’s “giddy turn,” and you stand awestruck and enchanted before a novel that comprehends character so keenly that it dispenses with character development.
It could be argued – as indeed it has – that Meredith’s people are papier mache, that the ink pulses rather too visibly through their papery skins. This criticism has no doubt something to do with the difficulty of beginning a Meredith novel, which drags its feet getting going, I’ve found on occasion. One prods along in fits and starts initially, clambering across the sentences, catching the swing of the style – until one discovers unawares the difficulty of putting the book down! Meredith’s people are like forces, you see, whose play becomes irresistible once it’s unleashed. Cardboard, if you’re looking for psychological realism: fine vellum, if you’re interested in depth.
I remember reading a review of Middlemarch here on Goodreads that praised Eliot’s novel as one written truly for adults. There are a number of less commendatory points I could make about Eliot’s writing, but personal animosities aside, that George has little on this one when it comes to understanding and depicting maturity. Meredith’s people are actuated by insights, principles, scruples, and impulses shaped at the heart of the human, approached by way of the mind.
Whose mind, or minds? The minds of characters given to spells of rumination disclosed to an unshakable narrator, or else, a narrator who presumes on characters who appear not to know their own minds? No, this is no James (much as I do adore him) or Eliot again: Meredith is on a par with his people, who usually know – whether by reflection or intuition – as much as he does about themselves and their actions, or otherwise, don’t have their ignorance broadcast. So Meredith’s characters are aware – they think, in the absence of an enforced separation of mind from soul – and somehow (really, it’s stunning) sustain a level footing with the narrator weaving in and out of their perceptions.
If Meredith’s books were written differently, I doubt they would achieve the same tender penetration – that is to say, the same extraordinary, exhilarating, mobilizing effect, which is part and parcel of the style. His prose, which verily borders on poetry, is a defiance of verisimilitude through language, and how bewildering is that?! Meredith lifts one up and sweeps one away from any distinguishable time and place, such that his stories are disengaged from the reality of their historical moment, or that of any subsequent one. But the fascinating thing about this extrication from reality is that it achieves a more potent realism. Meredith would have enjoyed hearing me say so, opposed as he was to sensationalism and sentimentalism, and in fact to naturalistic representation, in his day.
I’m loath to pull from Diana’s pages for examples of what I mean, because I usually find such demonstration reductive and possibly maneuvering, but I suppose I should quote:
“a little mouse of a thought scampered out of one of the chambers of his head and darted along the passages, fetching a sweat to his brows.” (p. 106)*
“Her humour was created to swim on waters where a prescribed and cultivated prudery should pretend to be drowning.” (p. 140)
“She was happily away, borne by a whiter than swan’s wing on the sapphire Mediterranean. Her letters to Emma were peeps of splendour for the invalid: her way of life on board the yacht, and sketches of her host and hostess as lovers in wedlock on the other side of our perilous forties; sketches of the bays, the towns, the people—priests, dames, cavaliers, urchins, infants, shifting groups of supple southerners—flashed across the page like a web of silk, and were dashed off, redolent of herself, as lightly as the silvery spray of the blue waves she furrowed; telling, without allusions to the land behind her, that she had dipped in the wells of blissful oblivion.” (p. 164)
“The plain speaking from the wound he dealt her was effective with a gentleman who would never have enjoyed his privileges had he been of a nature unsusceptible to her distinct wish and meaning.” (p. 364)
To the credit of Meredith’s detractors, it must be said that perspicuity is not his strong suit. Take the syntax of this sentence, for one: “Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant, have in honesty to admit the fact” (p. 161). Often enough irrelevant or discontinuous information muddles the flow of his paragraphs; sometimes the sequence of ideas is hard to make out. Meredith struggles with the kind of continuity that would hold him fast to fact – he doesn’t subscribe to an empirical logic, but a rational one founded upon metaphor.
[SPOILER ALERT, TO BE LIFTED BELOW]
It will sound as erratic as Meredith at his most outlandish to say that I read Diana’s final chapters with disgust written all over my face. I was frustrated and furious at the way things came to pass for the heroine. Meredith contrived the conclusion enough in advance, so I fidgeted away, hoping feverishly that his construction on events would somehow reconcile me to Diana’s predicament. For so I call it when one abjures independence as a stand-in for love!
There’s a famous saying by Lessing that, “If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand, and say: Father, I will take this one—the pure Truth is for You alone.” If I were granted the choice between experiencing romantic love only by being loved, and not experiencing romantic love at all, I would unquestionably choose the latter. Diana, indeed, miserably, does not get to choose: “A sidethought intruded” – this, after she rejects a proposal from Arthur Rhodes – “that he would have done his wooing poetically—not in the burly storm, or bull-Saxon, she apprehended. Supposing it imperative with her to choose? She looked up, and the bird of broader wing darkened the whole sky, bidding her know that she had no choice” (p. 455). Diana, for whom happiness understood conventionally amounts to life itself, as Emma at one point reflects, ultimately condescends.
It’s impossible to place Meredith’s sympathies in light of the ending – haven’t I tried! There isn’t a doubt in my mind that Diana is no marriage plot novel, but much did I exert myself in seeking the distinction. I should clarify that marriage in Meredith is already dissociated from the institution he – among other, plentiful late Victorians and their successors – disparage. I think of Hardy first and foremost, in the literary context, but also Kierkegaard, only because I’ve been reading him of late, both of whom endow marriage with the immanence of trial and of routine, and for whom “proprieties and varnish” (I take up Dickens now, though he belongs in a third camp altogether) are morally, when not mortally, damaging. It may be the case that Meredith does endorse this kind of union after all in coupling Diana – but I'd rather he didn't sacrifice her freedom! Nor do I find quite enough evidence for irony on his part, particularly as we’re meant to align with Diana’s hardiest “champions” throughout. Another prospect points to the final episode and Meredith’s insistence on “mating” Diana towards the end as evidence of a Shavian life-drive that, in fact, courses through the book – but that alternative sits no more comfortably with me, I confess. So I choose to think that Meredith quietly mourns Diana’s premature existence in the knowledge that her time has not yet come. He regrets that “a woman of blood and imagination in the warring world, without a mate whom she can revere,” must be classed with “those independent minor realms between greedy might neighbors, which conspire and undermine when they do not openly threaten to devour” (p. 486). I choose to compare the ending here to the tremendous conclusion of Beauchamp’s Career, whose protagonists pair off outrageously with their third likeliest partners. There’s a sublime kind of justice dealt at the end of that book nevertheless, and although it isn’t obviously repeated in Diana, a pattern emerges between them, such that Diana ends up with third best.
[END SPOILER ALERT]
I had quite a time of making my peace with Diana’s resolution, at the start of which my review, had I written it then, would have gotten off on a different foot. Praised be the novel, and the author, that sent me jumping so fervidly through so many hoops.
*These page numbers are rather for my own reference, from the Standard Edition of Diana (London: Constable & Co., 1915).
It could be argued – as indeed it has – that Meredith’s people are papier mache, that the ink pulses rather too visibly through their papery skins. This criticism has no doubt something to do with the difficulty of beginning a Meredith novel, which drags its feet getting going, I’ve found on occasion. One prods along in fits and starts initially, clambering across the sentences, catching the swing of the style – until one discovers unawares the difficulty of putting the book down! Meredith’s people are like forces, you see, whose play becomes irresistible once it’s unleashed. Cardboard, if you’re looking for psychological realism: fine vellum, if you’re interested in depth.
I remember reading a review of Middlemarch here on Goodreads that praised Eliot’s novel as one written truly for adults. There are a number of less commendatory points I could make about Eliot’s writing, but personal animosities aside, that George has little on this one when it comes to understanding and depicting maturity. Meredith’s people are actuated by insights, principles, scruples, and impulses shaped at the heart of the human, approached by way of the mind.
Whose mind, or minds? The minds of characters given to spells of rumination disclosed to an unshakable narrator, or else, a narrator who presumes on characters who appear not to know their own minds? No, this is no James (much as I do adore him) or Eliot again: Meredith is on a par with his people, who usually know – whether by reflection or intuition – as much as he does about themselves and their actions, or otherwise, don’t have their ignorance broadcast. So Meredith’s characters are aware – they think, in the absence of an enforced separation of mind from soul – and somehow (really, it’s stunning) sustain a level footing with the narrator weaving in and out of their perceptions.
If Meredith’s books were written differently, I doubt they would achieve the same tender penetration – that is to say, the same extraordinary, exhilarating, mobilizing effect, which is part and parcel of the style. His prose, which verily borders on poetry, is a defiance of verisimilitude through language, and how bewildering is that?! Meredith lifts one up and sweeps one away from any distinguishable time and place, such that his stories are disengaged from the reality of their historical moment, or that of any subsequent one. But the fascinating thing about this extrication from reality is that it achieves a more potent realism. Meredith would have enjoyed hearing me say so, opposed as he was to sensationalism and sentimentalism, and in fact to naturalistic representation, in his day.
I’m loath to pull from Diana’s pages for examples of what I mean, because I usually find such demonstration reductive and possibly maneuvering, but I suppose I should quote:
“a little mouse of a thought scampered out of one of the chambers of his head and darted along the passages, fetching a sweat to his brows.” (p. 106)*
“Her humour was created to swim on waters where a prescribed and cultivated prudery should pretend to be drowning.” (p. 140)
“She was happily away, borne by a whiter than swan’s wing on the sapphire Mediterranean. Her letters to Emma were peeps of splendour for the invalid: her way of life on board the yacht, and sketches of her host and hostess as lovers in wedlock on the other side of our perilous forties; sketches of the bays, the towns, the people—priests, dames, cavaliers, urchins, infants, shifting groups of supple southerners—flashed across the page like a web of silk, and were dashed off, redolent of herself, as lightly as the silvery spray of the blue waves she furrowed; telling, without allusions to the land behind her, that she had dipped in the wells of blissful oblivion.” (p. 164)
“The plain speaking from the wound he dealt her was effective with a gentleman who would never have enjoyed his privileges had he been of a nature unsusceptible to her distinct wish and meaning.” (p. 364)
To the credit of Meredith’s detractors, it must be said that perspicuity is not his strong suit. Take the syntax of this sentence, for one: “Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant, have in honesty to admit the fact” (p. 161). Often enough irrelevant or discontinuous information muddles the flow of his paragraphs; sometimes the sequence of ideas is hard to make out. Meredith struggles with the kind of continuity that would hold him fast to fact – he doesn’t subscribe to an empirical logic, but a rational one founded upon metaphor.
[SPOILER ALERT, TO BE LIFTED BELOW]
It will sound as erratic as Meredith at his most outlandish to say that I read Diana’s final chapters with disgust written all over my face. I was frustrated and furious at the way things came to pass for the heroine. Meredith contrived the conclusion enough in advance, so I fidgeted away, hoping feverishly that his construction on events would somehow reconcile me to Diana’s predicament. For so I call it when one abjures independence as a stand-in for love!
There’s a famous saying by Lessing that, “If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand, and say: Father, I will take this one—the pure Truth is for You alone.” If I were granted the choice between experiencing romantic love only by being loved, and not experiencing romantic love at all, I would unquestionably choose the latter. Diana, indeed, miserably, does not get to choose: “A sidethought intruded” – this, after she rejects a proposal from Arthur Rhodes – “that he would have done his wooing poetically—not in the burly storm, or bull-Saxon, she apprehended. Supposing it imperative with her to choose? She looked up, and the bird of broader wing darkened the whole sky, bidding her know that she had no choice” (p. 455). Diana, for whom happiness understood conventionally amounts to life itself, as Emma at one point reflects, ultimately condescends.
It’s impossible to place Meredith’s sympathies in light of the ending – haven’t I tried! There isn’t a doubt in my mind that Diana is no marriage plot novel, but much did I exert myself in seeking the distinction. I should clarify that marriage in Meredith is already dissociated from the institution he – among other, plentiful late Victorians and their successors – disparage. I think of Hardy first and foremost, in the literary context, but also Kierkegaard, only because I’ve been reading him of late, both of whom endow marriage with the immanence of trial and of routine, and for whom “proprieties and varnish” (I take up Dickens now, though he belongs in a third camp altogether) are morally, when not mortally, damaging. It may be the case that Meredith does endorse this kind of union after all in coupling Diana – but I'd rather he didn't sacrifice her freedom! Nor do I find quite enough evidence for irony on his part, particularly as we’re meant to align with Diana’s hardiest “champions” throughout. Another prospect points to the final episode and Meredith’s insistence on “mating” Diana towards the end as evidence of a Shavian life-drive that, in fact, courses through the book – but that alternative sits no more comfortably with me, I confess. So I choose to think that Meredith quietly mourns Diana’s premature existence in the knowledge that her time has not yet come. He regrets that “a woman of blood and imagination in the warring world, without a mate whom she can revere,” must be classed with “those independent minor realms between greedy might neighbors, which conspire and undermine when they do not openly threaten to devour” (p. 486). I choose to compare the ending here to the tremendous conclusion of Beauchamp’s Career, whose protagonists pair off outrageously with their third likeliest partners. There’s a sublime kind of justice dealt at the end of that book nevertheless, and although it isn’t obviously repeated in Diana, a pattern emerges between them, such that Diana ends up with third best.
[END SPOILER ALERT]
I had quite a time of making my peace with Diana’s resolution, at the start of which my review, had I written it then, would have gotten off on a different foot. Praised be the novel, and the author, that sent me jumping so fervidly through so many hoops.
*These page numbers are rather for my own reference, from the Standard Edition of Diana (London: Constable & Co., 1915).
April 23, 2010
This is a Victorian work of fiction, based on the life of notorious socialite Caroline Norton, who married a bad man, wrote pro-feminist literature, and got involved with several political figures. As a result, reading DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS is a curious combination of knowing it’s fiction that’s heavily based on real events, and trying to get lost in the emotional sensations that Meredith tries for with his all-over-the-place writing. Unfortunately, this book is REALLY HARD to read: Meredith’s sensory writing is less narrative and more modernist abstract experiment. Plus, it doesn’t help that the entirety of the plot was summed up in my first line, and is really nothing special, nor does Meredith succeed in playing up what could be an intriguing story.
January 4, 2014
It was very difficult for me to actually persist and finish this book. Meredith's language is convoluted and muddled; often I would have to re-read sentences in order to get an understanding of what was being said. And no one, absolutely no one of any era, speaks in the manner in which the characters in this book do!
The story is of a young woman, Diana, who has married a man with whom she doesn't get along, and has left him. She's divorced him, which apparently has destroyed his life. As time goes on, Diana becomes involved with several men, but is unable to maintain a relationship with most of them. I can see why: Diana is flirtatious and moody, changes her mind frequently, and in general makes life difficult for these men. Without saying more I will tell you that she does end up with someone, and by the time that happens the reader has been prepped well and expects this outcome.
The most important relationship in Diana's life is not with the men, but rather with her best friend, Lady Emma Dunstane. Emma stands by Diana through all the scandals that result from Diana's behavior, and takes care of her when Diana gets herself in trouble. Emma is like the "angel of the house", the stereotypical Victorian good woman; although there seems to be a slight undertone of lesbianism here, nothing comes of it and Emma is as delighted as anyone when Diana at last settles down.
I'm fairly certainly that I will attempt to read another novel by Meredith in the hopes that the next one might prove why Meredith's reputation is so good. In one of her "Common Reader" essays, Virginia Woolf expresses her mixed feelings regarding Meredith's style and novels. I'll re-read this essay and shall choose the next Meredith novel I'll attempt from Woolf's recommendations.
If you are a serious Victorian literature lover, go ahead and read this novel. You may enjoy it much more than I.
The story is of a young woman, Diana, who has married a man with whom she doesn't get along, and has left him. She's divorced him, which apparently has destroyed his life. As time goes on, Diana becomes involved with several men, but is unable to maintain a relationship with most of them. I can see why: Diana is flirtatious and moody, changes her mind frequently, and in general makes life difficult for these men. Without saying more I will tell you that she does end up with someone, and by the time that happens the reader has been prepped well and expects this outcome.
The most important relationship in Diana's life is not with the men, but rather with her best friend, Lady Emma Dunstane. Emma stands by Diana through all the scandals that result from Diana's behavior, and takes care of her when Diana gets herself in trouble. Emma is like the "angel of the house", the stereotypical Victorian good woman; although there seems to be a slight undertone of lesbianism here, nothing comes of it and Emma is as delighted as anyone when Diana at last settles down.
I'm fairly certainly that I will attempt to read another novel by Meredith in the hopes that the next one might prove why Meredith's reputation is so good. In one of her "Common Reader" essays, Virginia Woolf expresses her mixed feelings regarding Meredith's style and novels. I'll re-read this essay and shall choose the next Meredith novel I'll attempt from Woolf's recommendations.
If you are a serious Victorian literature lover, go ahead and read this novel. You may enjoy it much more than I.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 1, 2013
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, and the politics is vague in the extreme. The characters are wholly plausible - poor Emma, the devoted invalid friend with the flaky husband, Miss Asper subsuming her passions in pseudo-Catholicism, and the splendidly drawn Dacier, a real rotter but so badly treated by the heroine. OK, Meredith does get a bit waves-breaking-on-the-shore when it comes to the romance, but he was a Victorian writer after all. You'd forgive him a lot of that for the description of Dacier burning Diana's last letter (it takes several pages.)
I'd recommend the Project Gutenberg version - at the end there are the etext editor's bookmarks, all the best aphorisms crammed together!
I'd recommend the Project Gutenberg version - at the end there are the etext editor's bookmarks, all the best aphorisms crammed together!
December 19, 2013
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 finished few.
February 16, 2016
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 bella donna di origine irlandese, caratterizzata (e in qualche misura oppressa) da un'intelligenza vivace, acuta, che si rivelerà preziosa per tutti i personaggi maschili (politici, scrittori, banchieri, avvocati, editori) con i quali viene in contatto, si scontra con la difficoltà di conciliare questa sua dote/condanna con il desiderio naturale di ogni donna (di ogni essere umano) di amare ed essere amata.
Il libro è stato scritto nel 1886, in piena epoca vittoriana, e si sarebbe tentati di guardare a quel mondo con il distacco di chi ha ormai alle spalle un compiuto processo di emancipazione femminile, inaspettatamente prefigurato nel romanzo in una casuale comunicazione epistolare: "Mr. Braddock, who appears to have no distaste for conversations with me, assures me he expects the day to come when women will be encouraged to work at crafts and professions for their independence".
Ma la protagonista, Mrs Warwick, prendendo posto in una carrozza di terza classe del treno che la riporterà (assolutamente sola) dal Sussex a Londra , alle rimostranze di chi la vorrebbe accompagnare con la scusa di proteggerne l'incolumità, ribatte pronunciando un panegirico del gentiluomo inglese del tempo, di qualunque livello sociale:
"...and unprotected no woman is in England, if she is a third-class traveller. That is my experience of the class; and I shall return among my natural protectors – the most unselfishly chivalrous to women in the whole world"
Il libro è stato scritto nel 1886, in piena epoca vittoriana, e si sarebbe tentati di guardare a quel mondo con il distacco di chi ha ormai alle spalle un compiuto processo di emancipazione femminile, inaspettatamente prefigurato nel romanzo in una casuale comunicazione epistolare: "Mr. Braddock, who appears to have no distaste for conversations with me, assures me he expects the day to come when women will be encouraged to work at crafts and professions for their independence".
Ma la protagonista, Mrs Warwick, prendendo posto in una carrozza di terza classe del treno che la riporterà (assolutamente sola) dal Sussex a Londra , alle rimostranze di chi la vorrebbe accompagnare con la scusa di proteggerne l'incolumità, ribatte pronunciando un panegirico del gentiluomo inglese del tempo, di qualunque livello sociale:
"...and unprotected no woman is in England, if she is a third-class traveller. That is my experience of the class; and I shall return among my natural protectors – the most unselfishly chivalrous to women in the whole world"
February 11, 2017
The book was a gift from my father before I went to college. I ended up reading it at long last while sitting in a laundry mat in Alhambra. It made the rather dull chore go by quickly.
Want to read
April 13, 2008Highly recommended in Vivian Gornick's The End of the Novel of Love.
August 23, 2010
This book was really, really difficult to get into. I just couldn't do it. George Meredith knew the woman that he based the vivacious Diana off of. Meh, I just couldn't finish it.
June 15, 2010
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:].
June 5, 2013
This is a wonderful yet neglected novel; those who enjoy fiction by George Eliot or Charles Dickens would like it.
to-read-off-my-shelf
March 9, 2015Having a little public-domain e-book downloading spree.
November 20, 2025
Essential reading if you’re interested in the way the Victorian sensibility slowly gave way to the contemporary one, especially in respect to women. That said this tale of marital misery and the difficulties of escape from the same is something of a slog, despite many clever lines. The pace is glacial, the social and personal psychologizing too wearying (reminiscent of James on a bad day), the ending telegraphed over and over. And, yet, it was a read not without interest: the casual misogyny of the world Diana rebelled against is aptly illustrated, the caddishness and brutality of heterosexual relationships that Diana is ever trying to elude, and the vivifying homosocial relationship between the female leads (Emma and Diana) are all well captured. I won’t read it again. It’s not the melodrama. The prose is Too high strung and too slow , but if you are interested in the transition to modernism. Here is one source.
November 1, 2020
I really enjoy George Meredith's writing. He demands your full attention, and you are richly rewarded if you give it. He also wrote intelligent, independent-minded female characters, which was rare for male Victorian writers. So I enjoyed this book for the most part.
The parts I didn't enjoy were the sudden nasty, racist comments in otherwise beautiful passages (granted, they wouldn't have been frowned on at the time, but they just appeared so out-of-the-blue and snapped me out of my reading pleasure-haze), and trying to decipher what he might have been trying to say about independent women (and Irish people?) underneath it all, especially by the way the story ends. Hmm.
But yes, mostly a delightful read that broke me out of a reading slump!
The parts I didn't enjoy were the sudden nasty, racist comments in otherwise beautiful passages (granted, they wouldn't have been frowned on at the time, but they just appeared so out-of-the-blue and snapped me out of my reading pleasure-haze), and trying to decipher what he might have been trying to say about independent women (and Irish people?) underneath it all, especially by the way the story ends. Hmm.
But yes, mostly a delightful read that broke me out of a reading slump!
January 15, 2020
I love George Meredith for how attuned he is to the insufferable position of women in the 1800s. No male novelist of the time writes about this topic with more empathy and wit. However, this book didn't do much for me. I wasn't that interested in Diana or her troubles. I imagine it's a difficult task to create a character who is beautiful, noble, loveable, intelligent and interesting. Meredith is not able to rise to the task.
March 4, 2023
A challenging read for me. I didn't feel very attached to Diana or her story, but I felt that I stretched my comprehension skills a bit in the process of reading it.
One really lovely moment: "... her eyes were tearless, lustreless; she looked ancient in youth, and distant by a century, like a tall woman of the vaults, issuing white-ringed, not of our light."
One really lovely moment: "... her eyes were tearless, lustreless; she looked ancient in youth, and distant by a century, like a tall woman of the vaults, issuing white-ringed, not of our light."
February 28, 2021
If you've heard Meredith is unreadable, start with this novel. Diana proves a strong woman in tough circs. The prose surrounds her with depth while the story takes in politics, love found and lost and the birth of a writer.
August 20, 2025
Weird but kind of good...19th century fiction is crazy I can never work out if it's empowering to women or not...this book had some nicely surprisingly feminist elements but also plenty of traditionalism. Unexpected though and fun- plenty of melodrama
May 10, 2018
It was a torment to read. The characters are improbable and artificial, the language and style are stilted, and the plot predictable and clumsily constructed.
February 26, 2019
A bit boring I'm afraid
April 6, 2022
19th Century sordid Romance novel really isn't my thing. Though it did give a glimpse of Middle Class to Upper Class life for women
May 3, 2022
What in the fucking shithead is this shit?!!!!!!!! Frick fries!!!!! Dick and pussy!!!!!!!!!! And titties.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews