Why Oscar Wilde described George Meredith as chaos illumined by brilliant flashes of lightning
In short: George Meredith was a Victorian literary giant whose dense, psychologically complex prose once scandalized the public. Though he struggled for decades to find a wide audience, he became a mentor to writers like Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson, eventually earning the Order of Merit for his singular, challenging genius.
Born in 1828, George Meredith began his career as a poet before transitioning to the novels that would define his reputation. His early work, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), was so frank about human sexuality that it faced censorship from circulating libraries. This pattern of innovation meeting resistance continued throughout his life; his style was famously difficult, characterized by a syntactic complexity that Oscar Wilde memorably compared to lightning flashes within chaos.
Meredith’s life was marked by personal turbulence, including the collapse of his first marriage to Mary Ellen Nicolls and a long estrangement from his son, Arthur. His second marriage to Marie Vulliamy brought more stability, yet he remained an outsider to easy success. He supplemented his income as a publisher's reader for Chapman & Hall, where he famously rejected East Lynne—a massive bestseller—while simultaneously guiding the career of Thomas Hardy, whom he urged to abandon bitter satire for more artistic, plotted narratives.
Despite his struggles, Meredith’s influence was profound. His Essay on Comedy (1877) remains a foundational text in comic theory, and his novel The Egoist (1879) is widely considered his masterpiece. By the 1880s, he returned to poetry, believing it would be his most durable legacy. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize seven times and, by the time of his death in 1909, was recognized as one of the greatest literary figures of his age, holding the presidency of the Society of Authors.
His work often explored the subjugation of women and the rigid structures of class, themes that resonate with his own family history of bankruptcy and social climbing. While he joked about his head finally appearing above the water when his books became more affordable in the 1890s, his legacy remains that of a writer who stood alone, too individual for easy imitation and too intellectually demanding for the casual reader.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: George Meredith
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