The Egoist (1879). By

The Egoist is a tragicomical novel by George Meredith published in 1879. The novel recounts the story of self-absorbed Sir Willoughby Patterne and his attempts at marriage; jilted by his first bride-to-be, he vacillates between the sentimental Laetitia Dale and the strong-willed Clara Middleton. More importantly, the novel follows Clara's attempts to escape from her engagement to Sir Willoughby, who desires women to serve as a mirror for him and consequently cannot understand why she would not want to marry him. Thus, The Egoist dramatizes the difficulty contingent upon being a woman in Victorian society, when women's bodies and minds are trafficked between fathers and husbands to cement male bonds. Critical response: In an afterword by Angus Wilson, The Egoist was called "the turning point in George Meredith's career." Wilson saw Meredith as "the first great art novelist"; his afterword interprets the book as an adaptation of a stage comedy, an achievement he arrogates to few English authors, who, he suggests, present only "farce or satire." He compliments Meredith most when he is detached from his characters, as "it is then that our laughter is most thoughtful."Wilson is most taken by "the absolute truth of much of the dialogue," such as how "the way Sir Willoughby continues to speak through the answers of other characters, returning to notice their replies only when his own vein of thought is exhausted" is a "wonderful observation of human speech." In his essay "Books Which Have Influenced Me," Robert Louis Stevenson reports the following story: "A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the story) came to him in agony. 'This is too bad of you, ' he cried. 'Willoughby is me!' 'No, my dear fellow, ' said the author; 'he is all of us.'"E. M. Forster discussed the book in his lecture series Aspects of the Novel, using it as an example of a "highly organized" plot.Much of his discussion, however, focuses on Meredith and his popularity as an author. More materially, Forster compliments Meredith on not revealing Laetitia Dale's changed feelings for Willoughby until she rejects him in their midnight meeting; "[i]t would have spoiled his high comedy if we had been kept in touch throughout ... in fact it would be boorish. ... Meredith with his unerring good sense here lets the plot triumph" rather than explaining Dale's character more fully.Forster further compares Meredith with Thomas Hardy, complimenting Hardy on his pastoral sensibilities and Meredith on his powerful plots, "[knowing] what [his] novel[s] could stand." George Meredith, OM (12 February 1828 - 18 May 1909) was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times. LIFE: Meredith was born in Portsmouth, England, a son and grandson of naval outfitters. His mother died when he was five. At the age of 14 he was sent to a Moravian School in Neuwied, Germany, where he remained for two years. He read law and was articled as a solicitor, but abandoned that profession for journalism and poetry. He collaborated with Edward Gryffydh Peacock, son of Thomas Love Peacock in publishing a privately circulated literary magazine, the Monthly Observer. He married Edward Peacock's widowed sister Mary Ellen Nicolls in 1849 when he was twenty-one years old and she was twenty-eight. Meredith collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, in an 1851 volume, Poems. In 1856 he posed as the model for The Death of Chatterton, a notable painting by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis (1830-1916). His wife ran off with Wallis in 1858; she died three years later. The collection of "sonnets" entitled Modern Love (1862) emerged from this experience as did The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, his first "major novel"....