The Egoist

1879, 1979 Penguin English Library edition
George Meredith
The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative
Original price unknown, bought used for $2.75
Worn paperback but not bad condition for its age
B

If you thought Anna Karenina had a hard time getting out of a marriage, it's nothing to what Clara Middleton goes through trying to break off her engagement to the title character.  Luckily, this is a comedy and things end well for her, although not so much for Letty Dale, who is "an old woman" in her thirtieth year.  George Meredith has been called "a prose Browning," but I see him as the comedic version of Tolstoy, or George Eliot.  Like Leo and Girl George, Mr. Meredith likes to not just tell us what his characters are up to, but draw conclusions about humanity from this.  Thus what could be a breezy drawing-room farce (with Meredith more proto-Wildean than he was two decades earlier with Richard Feverel) pushes 600 pages.  George Woodcock's introduction calls this Meredith's most intellectual novel, but as with Eliot and Tolstoy, that's a mixed blessing.

It's been a long time since I've read Kate Millett's analysis of this novel, but I remember she dismissed the last portion of the novel as Austenian romantic misunderstandings.  (It was a few years too early for her to compare it to Three's Company.)  I think this is a disservice to both Jane Austen and Meredith.  In Richard Feverel, despite the tragedy, there's hope almost throughout, but here Clara's plight is overly disturbing.  Like Austen's Willoughby, Meredith's Willoughby is self-centred and womanising.  The latter's seductions are off-page but suggested more than once.  The damage that Meredith focuses on is mental and emotional.  Sir Willoughby treats everyone like a possession, but Vernon and the others are allowed some independence.  Clara and then Leticia are to be owned, body and soul.

On the one hand, it's admirable that Meredith exposed the male ego as he did, and in such a way that Willoughby is, as Meredith told a friend, "all of us."  On the other hand, spending so much of the novel with this unsavoury person (so that women, too, must identify with him) is disturbing in a different way than it was participating in Anna Karenina's moral and mental decline.