Published in 1885 and immediately popular, Diana of the Crossways was Meredith’s first successful novel. It tells the story of a beautiful, witty, and headstrong Irish woman, Diana, who is trapped in an unhappy and loveless marriage. Fashionable London is scandalized when Diana leaves her husband for another man, is accused of adultery, and becomes enmeshed in the political and social issues of the day.
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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.