George Meredith

George Meredith was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1828. After a difficult childhood and a brief legal apprenticeship, he turned to journalism and literature. His early poetry and fiction met with mixed success, but he gained recognition with the novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), a psychologically acute study of a father's misguided educational theories. Meredith's style, characterized by witty dialogue, intricate plots, and a dense, poetic prose, reached its peak in works such as The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885). He also wrote notable poetry, including Modern Love (1862), a sonnet sequence exploring marital breakdown. A respected literary figure in his later years, Meredith served as president of the Society of Authors. His influence on later writers, including Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf, is widely acknowledged. The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), an early work, is a fantastical allegorical novel set in an imagined Arabian landscape.