The Egoist (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

Meredith was purported to have said, “he is all of us” of the main character in his most enduring novel, The Egoist, published in 1879. The novel tells the “tragicomical” story of Sir Willoughby Pattene’s single-minded pursuit of a marriageable woman.  Sympathy, however, lies with Clara Middleton, one of Pattene‘s choices, and how this Victorian woman use her strength of will to break off an unwelcome engagement.

Meredith was purported to have said, "he is all of us" of the main character in his most enduring novel, The Egoist, published in 1879. The novel tells the "tragicomical" story of Sir Willoughby Pattene's single-minded pursuit of a marriageable woman. Sympathy, however, lies with Clara Middleton, one of Pattene's choices, and how this Victorian woman use her strength of will to break off an unwelcome engagement.

George Meredith (1828 –1909) was a English novelist and poet. His early novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) met with critical disapproval, but he had success with The Egoist (1879), a novel which combined comedy and psychology for the purposes of witty social criticism. The subjection of women, was a recurrent theme in his work and central in his most successful novel, Diana of the Crossways (1885). Meredith’s fifty-sonnet sequence about a loveless marriage, Modern Love (1862) was acclaimed for its candor about married life and for its extension of the sonnet form—each sonnet containing sixteen lines.