Bøker av George Meredith

George Meredith (1828 -1909) was an English novelist and poet during the Victorian era. In The Bascombe Valley Mystery, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle paid him homage when Holmes says to Watson: "And now let us talk about George Meredith, if you please, and we shall leave all minor matters until to-morrow." His Italian romance, Vittoria, introduces "peasants, citizens, and soldiers who are not simply correct, but vital; every figure in 'Vittoria' throbs with reality."

Virginia Woolf said of The Egoist: 'Meredith pays us a supreme compliment to which as novel-readers we are little accustomed ... He imagines us capable of disinterested curiosity in the behaviour of our kind.' In this, the most dazzlingly intellectual of all his novels, Meredith tries to illuminate the pretensions of the most powerful class within the very citadel of security which its members have built. He develops to their logical extremity his ideas on egoism, on sentimentality and on the power of comedy. Meredith saw egoism as the great enemy of truth, feeling and progress, and comedy as the great dissolver of artifice. The Egoist is the extreme expression of his recurrent theme: the defeat of egoism by the power of comedy.