30 Facts About George Meredith

George Meredith was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era.

George Meredith's novels were innovative in their attention to characters' psychology, and took a close interest in social change.

George Meredith was an encourager of other novelists, as well as an influence on them; among those to benefit were Robert Louis Stevenson and George Gissing.

George Meredith was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times.

The name George Meredith is Welsh, and he would describe himself as "half Irish and half Welsh".

George Meredith was proud of his Welsh origins, and such pride is evident in his novels.

George Meredith was educated in Southsea until 1840, when a legacy from his mother's sister, Anna, made it possible for him to attend a boarding school in Lowestoft, Suffolk.

George Meredith collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, in an 1851 volume, Poems.

The Death of Chatterton, a notable painting by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis, for which George Meredith served as the model, was exhibited in 1856.

George Meredith died three years later, of kidney failure, a few months after moving to Grotto Cottage, Oatlands Park, Weybridge.

George Meredith was by this time living in Chelsea, where he kept rooms in Hobury Street and often had Arthur in his care.

George Meredith did not attend Mary's funeral; neither did Henry Wallis or her father.

In 1863 George Meredith met Marie Vulliamy, a young woman of Anglo-French stock whose father, Justin, was the successful, recently retired proprietor of a wool business in Normandy.

Attraction was immediate, and by 1864 George Meredith was writing to his friend Frederick Maxse that "She has done me the honour to love me for some time".

George Meredith continued to write poetry, often inspired by nature, but his most notable publications following his second marriage were novels.

George Meredith attempted to complete a play, entitled The Sentimentalists, which he had begun in 1862.

George Meredith followed it with The Tragic Comedians, which was written quickly and without great conviction.

George Meredith supplemented his often uncertain writer's income with a job as a publisher's reader.

Gissing wrote in a letter to his brother Algernon that George Meredith's novels were "of the superlatively tough species".

George Meredith advised Hardy not to publish his book as it would be attacked by reviewers and destroy his hopes of becoming a novelist.

George Meredith felt the book was too bitter a satire on the rich, and counselled Hardy to put it aside and write another "with a purely artistic purpose" and more of a plot.

George Meredith spoke from experience; his own first big novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, was judged so shocking that Mudie's circulating library had cancelled an order of 300 copies.

George Meredith's books were translated into Japanese and influenced author Natsume Soseki.

George Meredith's politics were those of a Radical Liberal, and he was friends with other Radicals such as Frederick Maxse, whom he met around 1860, and John Morley, whom he first encountered in print, as the Literary Gazettes enraptured reviewer of Evan Harrington.

George Meredith was moved to joke to James Payn, editor of the Cornhill Magazine, that his "submerged head [was] strangely appearing above the waters in England".

George Meredith continued to publish new novels, including One of our Conquerors, an experimental portrait of a troubled marriage, and Lord Ormont and his Aminta, which depicts a woman breaking free from a humiliating marriage and re-establishing her self-worth through a new relationship.

Max Beerbohm's caricature for Vanity Fair, published in 1896 and captioned "Our First Novelist", was an indication of George Meredith's standing at that time; Beerbohm thought him, Shakespeare apart, the greatest English literary figure.

George Meredith's ashes were buried alongside Marie's in the cemetery at Dorking, Surrey.

George Meredith's style has attracted a great deal of comment, both favourable and disapproving.

However, admirers since George Eliot have applauded the poetic qualities of Meredith's prose.