Customer Reviews (2)

One of the finest novels of the Victorian century
Meredith's masterpiece is woefully underread, and it is a sad truth that the Norton scholarly edition is the only edition of THE EGOIST now in print. This is not an easy read, however: Meredith's caustic dialogue foreshadows henry James's in its mastery of ambiguities, and his witty paradoxes surpass even Oscar Wilde (who admitted his debt to Meredith). The plot is a simple one: the wealthy handsome and titled Sir Willoughby Patterne, having been jilted by one fiancée, proposes to another young woman, theintelligent and intensely likeable Clara Middleton, who accepts him; before very long, Clara has realized what a monstrous egoist Sir Willoughby is, but not after it seems too late for her to go back on her word. This is one of the most brilliant studies of mortification ever accomplished, and what makes it all the more amazing is that Meredith clearly modelled Sir Willoughby in part on himself and the extraordinarily sympathetic Clara on his wife, Mary Ellen Peacock, who deserted Meredith for another man. This book is funny, thought-provoking, and exceptionally poignant: there are moments when you read it that your heart will go into your stomach as you sympathize with Clara's appalling plight.

A Great Comedy of Manners
This is one of the funniest novels I've ever read. The basic story is simple:Sir Willoughby Patterne's betrothal to the young Clara Middleton is threatened when she realizes his enormous love of himself.The novelconsists of Clara's efforts to get out of the engagement without doingsomething so scandalous as eloping with someone else.

The charactersare drawn vividly and with depth. The incidents are both amusing andrealistic. Clara Middleton is one of the great witty heroines of Englishliterature, perhaps the wittiest Victorian heroine.

The beginning can beslow going. Meredith likes to use twenty words when other people might useten. He also likes to play verbal games.As you proceed in the novel andget used to the style, you can have a lot of fun picking out the puns,allusions, etc.

This is Meredith's best novel. The plot is tightlycontrolled and the ending is pure comedy in the tradition of Fielding,Austen and Thackeray. I highly recommend this novel to anyone who feelscomfortable reading Victorian English and likes a good love-comedy. ... Read more

Book Description
THIS 56 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: Poems by George Meredith, by George Meredith. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 1417930691. ... Read more

Product Description
Vine-hills, among the hottest sun-bibbers of the Rheingau, glistened in the roll of Gottlieb’s possessions; corn-acres below Cologne; basalt-quarries about Linz; mineral-springs in Nassau, a legacy of the Romans to the genius and enterprise of the first of German traders. ... Read more

Product Description
This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1912 edition by Charles Scribner\'s Sons, New York. ... Read more

Book Description
1917. Two Volumes in One. A collection of verse from Meredith who was poet as well as a novelist. Meredith's work is characterized by brilliant psychological insights, carefully chosen diction and powerful imagery. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing. ... Read more

Book Description
Of all nineteenth-century English novels," claims Edward Mendelson in his Introduction to this edition, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is the most self-consciously literary in its style and structure and the most sexually explicit in its plot and theme." First published in 1859, Meredith's first and most controversial novel concerns Sir Austin Feverel's misconceived attempts to educate his son Richard according to a system of his own devising--a system based on theories of sexual restraint. Exploring generational and gender conflicts, the psychology of sexual jealousy and repression, and myths of Eden and Utopia, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel shocked Victorian readers but gained for itself a cult following. "Now that it has been freed from its reputation," writes Mendelson, "readers can discover again the tragic and ironic force, and the psychological and formal complexity that make The Ordeal of Richard Feverel one of the most profound, subtle, and moving works of English fiction."

A wonderfully ironic and impassioned novel of war between the sexes and the generations by a writer who "deserves our gratitude and excites our interest as a great innovator" (Virginia Woolf) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The Ordeal: Eden Revisited
THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL is a novel that suffers from the author's inability to decide whether he wished to write a comedy that had tragic overtones or a tragedy with comic undertones.The result is neither a literary fish nor a polemical fowl.George Meredith was just starting a long career when he wrote this book, in which he later made numerous changes, omitting many unneeded characters, the result of which was to create a slightly more coherent work.

Part of the problem with the reader's blending into the book was the scattershot sprinkling of religious allegory that Meredith uses to emphasize his theme that man was born innocent but corrupted by scheming women.Meredith mentions more than a few times the word "apple" in an Edenic context, a symbolism which tends to flatten his characters into updated biblical figures.In real life George Meredith was hurt by an uncaring father who probably was the model for Sir Austen Feverel, who decided to recreate the biblical confrontation between Adam, Eve, and the snake.Only this time Sir Austen would eliminate the snake and give Adam advance knowledge of Eve's duplicity.Adam is Sir Austen's son, Richard, who from birth is taught to accept the teachings of a new system which emphasizes the growth of positive personal attributes on one hand and a watchful caution of womanly wiles on the other.Richard, then, is groomed to be a successful sociological Petri dish in which Richard avoids the apple bite that ensnared Adam.The problem, of course, is that a man is not a dish, and for the entire experiment to succeed in the sense that Richard would grow up as his father wished, then Sir Austen would have to have the same divine foresight that God has.All he has is a wish to prevent his son from suffering as he himself suffered at the hands of an unscrupulous woman, but this desire is not enough to shape Richard's growth into a healthy direction.Predictably, Richard drifts in and out of trouble, sometimes aided by his father's money, and other times by the timely intervention of trusted companions.Later, when Richard falls in love, he is not equipped by nature or training to withstand the womanly wiles of a lady whose hired job is to do just that.Thus Sir Austen's grand design has a cracked flaw that results in tragedy for Richard and his beloved.THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL, in its unwieldy mixture of romance, tragedy, drama, and bible lore run amuck, becomes more of an ordeal for the reader than for Richard.

Funny, Wise, and Brilliantly Written
I started reading George Meredith in an English class at Hunter College, where a brilliant professor assigned us *The Egoist.* Although not as great as that novel, The Ordeal is quite rewarding on its own terms. The story begins with the tale of a comically embittered misogynist who responds to his wife's adulterous romance (with poet and best friend "Diaper Sandoe") by rejecting women *en toto* and deciding to raise his son Richard in isolation from society. Well, "we shall see how the experiment turned out." Richard, needless to say, reaches the age of 15 and discovers that contra his father, girls have their charms. Things go from there. The book is filled with funny, quirky and brilliant characters rendered in delightfully elaborate prose. It isn't, contrary to one reviewer's remark, Dickensian at all; for unlike Dickens, Meredith has something to say. He is not so much periphrastic as he is precise. I found The Ordeal quite funny -- I've read it three times -- as well as heartbreaking and wise. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys Victorian fiction. I would start here and then go on to *The Egoist*, possibly the wittiest novel ever written.

Meredith's Bildungsroman
George Meredith is best known for his poetry and his later novel _The Egoist_, and these are indeed the best places to begin with Meredith's oeuvre. _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ is not nearly as lapidary in style or as acute in psychology as _The Egoist_.The latter work also illustrates Meredith's famed comic theory, though this is somehat in evidence in _The Ordeal_.
In the final analysis, Meredith's own judgment of _The Ordeal_ is the correct one: it is novel whose dullness proves fatal.Moreover, though _The Ordeal_ displays a sophisticated morality, Meredith's Bildungsroman is greatly inferior to Goethe's model _Wilhelm Meister_.Meredith is neither as perspicacious a psychologist nor as great a stylist as Goethe.
Nonetheless, _The Ordeal_ is a successful dramatic work and provides a wonderful addition to the British Bildungsroman. Furthermore,_The Ordeal_ is a very modern novel, featuring a number of unstable narrative voices, a pervasive intertextuality, and a subtle ironic spirit. Though Meredith's prose, like his poetry, is often overly precious, _The Ordeal_ proves him an incisive writer, leagues above many of his contemporaries, e.g. Thomas Hardy. Indeed, _The Ordeal_, along with _The Egoist_, provides a direct link between the Victorian and the modern novel, and thus, while hardly a masterpiece, it is well worth the time for any reader interested in the development of the English novel.

for Brit Lit specialists
I don't think it's something you'd want to read for its own sake unless you have a particular interest in the development of the novel in in the nineteenth century. The plot concerns the efforts of Sir Austin Feverel to prevent his son's marriage and then to break it up. There are ponderous attemps at humor. A tragic and melodramatic ending is tacked on. The story is often difficult to follow, with characters being assigned different names. Jane Austen had already shown how a a tight light novel could be constructed. Madame Bovary had been written (for the diffference between mediocrity and genius compare the descriptions of the food at the wedding breakasts in this and in Madame Bovary). This has the clumsy baggy long-winded structure of Dickens (who was writing Great Expectations at the sme time) but without the great characters and confrontations. This was popular literature in its time, and considered scandalous. ... Read more