George Meredith is known chiefly as a Victorian novelist and poet; his shorter fiction appeared toward the beginning of his career, in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and reached its fullest development in three stories published in the 1870s in the New Quarterly Magazine. Most of these stories explore themes that are also keynotes of Meredith's novels: the danger that egotism poses to the self and others; exhortation to celebrate nature and avoid sentimentality and prudery; the curative powers of laughter; the slipperiness of self-definition in a rapidly altering society; and the moral integrity, intelligence, and independence of women.

Meredith's fiction has presented difficulties to Victorian as well as twentieth-century readers. Henry James decried the "tortuosities" of Meredith's prose; E. M. Forster compared a Meredith plot to "a series of kiosks most artfully placed among wooded slopes, which his people reach by their own impetus"; V. S...