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True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and…
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True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives (original 1972; edição 2020)

por Diane Johnson (Autor)

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1192227,791 (4)9
""Many people have described the Famous Writer presiding at his dinner table. . . . He is famous; everybody remembers his remarks. . . . We forget that there were other family members at the table-a quiet person, now muffled by time, shadowy, whose heart pounded with love, perhaps, or rage." So begins The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, an uncommon biography devoted to one of those "lesser lives." As the author points out, "A lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one." Such sympathy and curiosity compelled Diane Johnson to research Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith (1821-1861), the daughter of the famous artist Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) and first wife of the equally famous poet George Meredith (1828-1909). Her life, treated perfunctorily and prudishly in biographies of Peacock or Meredith, is here exquisitely and unhurriedly given its due. What emerges is the portrait of a brilliant, well-educated woman, raised unconventionally by her father only to feel more forcefully the constraints of the Victorian era. First published in 1972, Lesser Lives has been a key text for feminists and biographers alike, a book that reimagined what biography might be, both in terms of subject and style. Biographies of other "lesser" lives have since followed in its footsteps, but few have the wit, elegance, and empathy of Johnson's seminal work"--… (mais)
Membro:hblanchard
Título:True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives
Autores:Diane Johnson (Autor)
Informação:The New York Review of Books, Inc (2020), 256 pages
Coleções:A sua biblioteca
Avaliação:
Etiquetas:biography

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The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives por Diane Johnson (1972)

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A chatty, unique biography of Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith. She was the wife of Victorian novelist George Meredith, daughter of Thomas Love Peacock. She left George Meredith and her loveless boring marriage, had a child with her lover, and then died. This biography tries to imagine what she might really have been like and tries to escape from the Victorian conventions that judged her. ( )
  japaul22 | Nov 5, 2023 |
Mary Ellen Peacock Needles Meredith was married to a man the Victorians considered one of the 'Great Men' of their time, the writer George Meredith. Meredith was someone Virginia Woolf in a later age considered "the most grown up of the Victorian novelists". This book is not about George though. It is about Mary Ellen, his first wife, one of those in the orbit of the famous, but not famous herself, and so destined to be a "lesser life".

Briefly, Mary Ellen was educated well by her father the writer Thomas Peacock. Married at twenty-three, two months later she was a pregnant widow. Four years later she met and married Meredith, who was seven years her junior. Thus began a life of drudgery, while George wrote. Ten years later, at thirty-seven, she had an affair with Henry Wallis and left the marriage. Pregnant once more, she found herself alone and dying of the kidney disease that would kill her at forty. She died alone and in debt, for as Johnson tells us Because of course, as every Victorian knew, if you have sinned you cannot, cannot possibly, expect to die surrounded by your family and friends. George had refused permission for their son to see his mother ever again, and relented only when it was too late.

Johnson describes George as "momentarily afflicted" by Mary Ellen's death. He wrote to a friend following a vacation when I entered the world again... I found that one had quitted it who bore my name: and this filled my mind with melancholy recollections which I rarely give way to. Thomas Peacock was devastated and never fully recovered.

What Diane Johnson has done is write a biography where there are no lesser lives. As she says, But we know a lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one. She looks at as many of Mary Ellen and George's family and social circles as she can, and then fits them together in an inspired and delightful fashion, so demonstrating some of the complexity of Victorian life.

Johnson says she became interested in Mary Ellen ...resenting on her behalf the way she was always dismissed in biographies of George Meredith: the unhappy wife who had left him and, of course, died, as if death were the deserved fate for Victorian wives who broke the rules. She managed to track down the house where Mary Ellen and Henry's son had lived. The couple who had just inherited it let her go through the box room, and there she found letters from Mary Ellen to Henry. Fifty years later, this biography has certainly stood the test of time. Ironically, George Meredith himself hasn't fared as well.
  SassyLassy | Dec 24, 2022 |
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""Many people have described the Famous Writer presiding at his dinner table. . . . He is famous; everybody remembers his remarks. . . . We forget that there were other family members at the table-a quiet person, now muffled by time, shadowy, whose heart pounded with love, perhaps, or rage." So begins The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, an uncommon biography devoted to one of those "lesser lives." As the author points out, "A lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one." Such sympathy and curiosity compelled Diane Johnson to research Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith (1821-1861), the daughter of the famous artist Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) and first wife of the equally famous poet George Meredith (1828-1909). Her life, treated perfunctorily and prudishly in biographies of Peacock or Meredith, is here exquisitely and unhurriedly given its due. What emerges is the portrait of a brilliant, well-educated woman, raised unconventionally by her father only to feel more forcefully the constraints of the Victorian era. First published in 1972, Lesser Lives has been a key text for feminists and biographers alike, a book that reimagined what biography might be, both in terms of subject and style. Biographies of other "lesser" lives have since followed in its footsteps, but few have the wit, elegance, and empathy of Johnson's seminal work"--

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