Have you read George Meredith? A very interesting but…
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Have you read George Meredith?
A very interesting but largely forgotten Victorian writer. Too innovative and experimental for his own time, too Victorian for us perhaps, one of those untimely writers who can't be classified easily. Oscar Wilde famously quipped: "Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do anything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate". It's a great quote but what makes it even funnier is that it's totally spot on, that's exactly how Meredith writes: "whatever he is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a child of realism who is not on speaking terms with his father".
I read three of his novels many, many years ago at university; my English wasn't perfect back then, to put it mildly, and Meredith's dense prose was way above my paygrade, I can't say I remember anything from them really, but now I'm rereading Woolf's essays – she knew Meredith personally, he was a family friend – and her piece "The Novels of George Meredith h https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301251h.html#e23 from *The Second Common Reader* made me want to go back and challenge myself again. Meredith's *Diana of the Crossways* begins with what is sometimes called the most difficult and dense first chapter in the whole 19th century prose haha. Gissing's also on my list I think, there's something interesting in rereading Victorians with our modern attitudes, reading critically between the lines, but also enjoying the prose. Oh, and a great quote from Woolf to finish the post:
>Meredith pays us a supreme compliment to which as novel-readers we are little accustomed. We are civilised people, he seems to say, watching the comedy of human relations together. Human relations are of profound interest. Men and women are not cats and monkeys, but beings of a larger growth and of a greater range. He imagines us capable of disinterested curiosity in the behaviour of our kind. This is so rare a compliment from a novelist to his reader that we are at first bewildered and then delighted.
#entertainment
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A very interesting but largely forgotten Victorian writer. Too innovative and experimental for his own time, too Victorian for us perhaps, one of those untimely writers who can't be classified easily. Oscar Wilde famously quipped: "Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do anything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate". It's a great quote but what makes it even funnier is that it's totally spot on, that's exactly how Meredith writes: "whatever he is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a child of realism who is not on speaking terms with his father".
I read three of his novels many, many years ago at university; my English wasn't perfect back then, to put it mildly, and Meredith's dense prose was way above my paygrade, I can't say I remember anything from them really, but now I'm rereading Woolf's essays – she knew Meredith personally, he was a family friend – and her piece "The Novels of George Meredith h https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301251h.html#e23 from *The Second Common Reader* made me want to go back and challenge myself again. Meredith's *Diana of the Crossways* begins with what is sometimes called the most difficult and dense first chapter in the whole 19th century prose haha. Gissing's also on my list I think, there's something interesting in rereading Victorians with our modern attitudes, reading critically between the lines, but also enjoying the prose. Oh, and a great quote from Woolf to finish the post:
>Meredith pays us a supreme compliment to which as novel-readers we are little accustomed. We are civilised people, he seems to say, watching the comedy of human relations together. Human relations are of profound interest. Men and women are not cats and monkeys, but beings of a larger growth and of a greater range. He imagines us capable of disinterested curiosity in the behaviour of our kind. This is so rare a compliment from a novelist to his reader that we are at first bewildered and then delighted.
#entertainment
source
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