Between 1856 and 1895, George Meredith published fifteen novels and a number of long short stories or novellas, taking as his special subject the instability of human relationships within a sharply conceived but usually arbitrary social context. As a novelist, he was interested in the individual, not in the crowd, the events which affected his individuals occurring more in the head than in the daily traffic of exterior existence. He was, or during the course of his career became, a psychological novelist, seeming to some idiosyncratic but to others profoundly right in his rejection of the moral standards his contemporaries took for granted.

Born in Hampshire in 1828, Meredith was the grandson of Melchizedek Meredith, a well-established Portsmouth tailor; he was the son of Augustus Meredith, who took over the business when the "Great Mel" died, and of Jane Macnamara, the daughter of an innkeeper. Meredith was educated at St. Paul's...