George Meredith

George Meredith (1828–1909) was an English novelist and poet, born in Portsmouth, the son of a tailor, a fact he spent his life concealing. His first wife, a daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, left him for a painter, and the sonnet sequence Modern Love (1862) records the wreck of that marriage. He worked for thirty years as a publisher's reader, encouraging Hardy and Gissing, while writing novels of elaborate style and psychological comedy: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The Egoist, Diana of the Crossways and Beauchamp's Career. His lecture on the Idea of Comedy is a critical classic. He received the Order of Merit in 1905.