George Meredith

George Meredith was a poet and novelist admired by other novelists more than by the reading public, and he knew it. He worked as a publisher's reader for decades while writing books that demanded more from a reader than the age was willing to give. The Egoist is a comedy of self-regard so exact that it has been called cruel; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel was refused by the circulating libraries and made his name among writers. His prose is dense with wit and elliptical by design, on the principle that a reader who is told everything learns nothing. His first wife left him for a painter and died in poverty; his sequence of poems about that marriage, Modern Love, is the most unsparing account of a marriage failing in Victorian literature.