Modern Love

Stamford, CT: Overbrook Press, 1934. Limited Edition, one of only 150 copies of this edition. Hardcover, in slipcase [which has minor wear and soiling]. Very good. [12], 50, [6] pages. Format is approximately 5.25 inches by 7 inches, with the slipcase slightly larger. Composition by Margaret Evans. Presswork by John F. MacNamara. George Meredith OM (12 February 1828 - 18 May 1909) was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. At first his focus was poetry but he gradually established a reputation as a novelist. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) briefly scandalized Victorian literary circles. Of his later novels, the most enduring is The Egoist (1879), though his greatest success was Diana of the Crossways (1885). His novels were innovative in their attention to characters' psychology, and also took interest in social change. His style, in both poetry and prose, was noted for its syntactic complexity. He was an encourager of other novelists, as well as an influence on them; among those were Robert Louis Stevenson and George Gissing. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times. Meredith collaborated with Edward Gryffydh Peacock in publishing a privately circulated literary magazine, the Monthly Observer. One of the contributors was Edward Peacock's sister Mary Ellen Nicolls. Mary was the widow of a naval officer, Lieutenant Edward Nicolls, who in 1844 had drowned. In August 1849 Meredith married Mary. At the time of the marriage, Meredith was twenty-one years old; she was twenty-eight and had a daughter by Lieutenant Nicolls (born after his death). The marriage produced one son, and Mary had an illegitimate son by the painter Arthur Wallis. The couple were unreconciled and Meredith did not attend her funeral. Meredith's novella in verse about the breakdown of a Victorian bourgeois marriage is a tragic study of 'shipwrecked' love. Modern Love (1862) by George Meredith is a collection of 50 16-line sonnets about the failure of his first marriage. He reflects his own disillusionment after his wife Mary Ellen, the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, left him for the painter Henry Wallis. The poems consist of four characters: a husband, wife, another man and another woman. His wife left him and eloped with another man and for that he never forgave her, but at the same time he talked about her tears (as they were not happy with one another, maybe financial crisis was one of the reasons) in the very first line as he said "Wept With Waking Eyes". Meredith's heavy but potent phrase is: "Imagination urging appetite." This original romantic sin results in poems that writhe with mixed emotions. The memory of happier times now "shipwrecked" is one of the strongest threads in the weave: we never doubt that the marriage was founded on love. Disgust, disillusion, misogyny, self-hatred and ironic despair mingle in the speaker, and it's these often-raw emotions that charge the sequence's metrical good manners with the pulse of living speech. But Modern Love remains an outstanding work in its genre, and the title leaves us with a lingering puzzle. Does Meredith find something inherently corrupt in specifically "modern" love - or is his argument with the whole construct of romantic love throughout the ages?