The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives

by Diane Johnson, Vivian Gornick (Introduction)

A classic of alternative biography and feminist writing, this empathetic and witty book gives due to a "lesser" figure of history, Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith, who was brilliant, unconventional, and at odds with the constraints of Victorian life.“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.

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, Womens, Classics, British Literature, 20th Century

263 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Diane Johnson is an American novelist and essayist whose satirical novels often feature American heroines living in contemporary France. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Persian Nights in 1988.
In addition to her literary works, she is also known for writing the screenplay of the 1980 film The Shining together with its director and producer Stanley Kubrick.

Reviews

[Terence]

7.5 out of 10

The 19th century British author George Meredith is best remembered today (if at all) for the 50-sonnet cycle Modern Love, a recounting of his marriage to Mary Ellen (née Love Peacock) and their bitter divorce. In The True Story, Diane Johnson teases out Mary Ellen’s side of the affair and gives her a voice she’s hitherto not had.

Aside from Modern Love, George’s other claim to fame is a consensus among critics both contemporary and modern that he was nearly unique amongst male Victorian authors for his realistically complex and sympathetic female characters. A depth attributed to the insights he gained from his and Mary Ellen’s travails. While Johnson concedes that George excelled at portraying women, his empathy was not as progressive as one might hope, either in his writing or in how he dealt with the divorce.

But George, as we shall see, was vindictive not magnanimous, and he was bound to have written this poem in a mood of self-justification, for it would be read by people who knew his personal history. It is not a modern but a Spasmodic poem, in a mode then current.

What Meredith meant by “Modern” is not that he was treating adultery – that is very old indeed. By “Modern Love” he meant sentimental love, the “morbid passion of our day,” as he called it. The narrator of the poem has too exalted a notion of Love, as something holy and enduring in a real world where real women are faithless and over-sophisticated….

At the same time that the poem makes a serious statement condemning notions of Romantic love, it assuages George’s stung male vanity by making the narrator a bit of a rake with a mistress and a desk full of old “wanton-scented tresses” – something George was apparently not. The ending of the poem, in which the wife magnanimously kills herself in order to make way for his pursuit of a new love, is sheer wish-fulfillment, but George may unconsciously have hoped it would suggest to his friends that Mary Ellen had left him for something like the same reason. (p. 213)

The author recounts an episode when an elderly Meredith is asked about Mary Ellen by an impolitic young admirer and he explodes in a tirade about an older woman taking advantage of a much younger man (she was only six years his senior):

Ah, yes. Too young. While a mere boy still articled to a solicitor. Entrapped into it, really. A sad affair. She was mad, you know. Madness on her mother’s side of the family. And she was nine years – nearly a decade! – older than me. A mistake, a sad mistake. No sun warmed my rooftree.

This is the version the timid interviewer conveyed to the waiting world. The Biographer repeated it. The World is sympathetic. To be married to a madwoman in his youth is just the thing for a writer, though. Formative. A mad old woman, think of that…. His exaggeration of her age was certainly ungenerous, but it was whispered that she had run off with a minor Pre-Raphaelite, which proves that George was correct on the detail of her madness. What woman altogether sane would leave a man so clearly destined to be great? A man who would be called the “champion of women,” would be considered a great feminist whose ability to understand and portray women – particularly lively, independent ones – suggested a wisdom and maturity almost unrivaled among the dogmatic, insecure males of the nineteenth century. How could anyone leave a man like that? (pp. 92-3)

But enough of George. As Johnson does, let’s focus on the woman upon whom all of self-righteous Victorian opprobrium fell: Mary Ellen.

Unlike her husband’s, little remains of Mary Ellen’s life for a biographer to work with. But Johnson closely reads letters and memoirs of her and the people in her orbit to reconstruct the life of someone George’s equal in intellect and talent and, tragically, ambition.

Both her biological and spiritual ancestresses were eighteenth-century women and Mary Ellen was a Victorian. Victorians did not like or approve of such redoubtable eighteenth-century types as Mary Shelley, or her mother, the great feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft – immoral, intellectual, blue-stocking ladies, who had lovers and illegitimate babies, wrote novels and held strong beliefs. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, did not believe in marriage.

It was somehow more possible to be a clever, strong-minded woman with beliefs in the eighteenth century than it was in the nineteenth; the stabler, eighteenth-century society was not so threatened by the notion, and the economics were different; wives were useful and pulled their weight. Unfortunately for Mary Ellen, her father, used to his mother, grandmother, and other intellectual ladies, grew up preferring their sort – grew up to become friends with Mary Shelley and with Claire Clairmont, the mistress of Byron. These women were well-intentioned godmothers whose influence was as destructive as a curse upon the cradle of an infant female born in a time when women had scarcely ever in history been more silly, passive, uninstructed , and suppressed….

The education of girls and women was mostly directed at preserving the way society – that is, Victorian fathers and husbands – thought they ought to be. Victorian women knew a little geography and how to add and subtract; they read the cleaner classics and literature of a spiritually improving nature. If you drew and painted and played the piano a little, you were “accomplished.” You sewed, perhaps you understood about cooking and domestic management. You were an influence for purity and religiousness in your family, you endured but did not enjoy sex…. And there was a whole lot about the world you did not know or think of, because you did not want to know, and your husband and brothers did not want you to know, and if you found out, you pretended not to know just the same. You did not know, for example, exactly what happened to any poor girl who was “ruined,” although whatever it was, you knew, was dreadful. The ideal Victorian woman was innocent, unlearned, motherly, and, though devoutly worshipped, she was also notoriously dull company both at the dinner table and in bed….

The themes of Mary Ellen’s notes reveal an intellectual woman, with a taste for aphorism, in extreme agitation of mind. In a day when women did not admit such things to themselves, she had admitted that she did not love her husband. In a day when such things were never done, she recognized that she wanted to leave him. That she had been, or wanted to be, unfaithful to him. That their marriage was a mistake. Moreover, a woman struggling with extreme feelings of guilt about these discoveries, struggling to subdue guilt, to fee herself not a victim of the narrow Victorian moral code but somehow above it. observant of a higher morality in which love and independence had a place – in which people were not to be martyrs to other people, or to rules. An educated and witty woman. And yet, withal, a Victorian woman, convinced at heart of the superiority of men, a little ashamed of being prey to powerful emotions and powerful convictions. Mary Ellen sought self-respect and justification, and, perhaps, an ideal love. The themes of her notes are recurring: a woman having doubts about a man she loves; the nature of marriage; the loss of illusion about love; deceitful women; the necessity orf suffering to achieve moral perfection; adultery; courtesans. (pp. 17, 46, 101-2)

Mary Ellen was never completely ostracized. Her family and many friends stood by her (much to George’s frustration) but her life was cut short by kidney disease in 1861, when she was only 40; only a few years after the divorce and after George had claimed Arthur, their only child, and had refused to allow her to see him.

The True History is not a typical biography. There’s so little that remains of a lost life, but it is a fascinating one and highly recommended.

I’d also recommend Modern Love. While I’m with Johnson in her jaundiced view of George, the academic consensus about his writings isn’t altogether wrong. If his insight is not as profound as advertised, George still captures the pain, anger and confusion of a relationship’s end from the get-go and in many subsequent sonnets:

By this he knew she wept with waking eyes: / That, at his hand’s light quiver by her head, / The strange low sobs that shook their common bed / Were called into her with a sharp surprise, / And strangely mute, like little gasping snakes, / Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay / Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away / With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes / Her giant heart of Memory and Tears / Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat / Sleep’s heavy measure, they from head to feet / Were moveless, looking through their dead black years, ‘ By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall. / Like sculptured effigies they might be seen / Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between; / Each wishing for the sword that severs all. (Sonnet I)

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The blurb on the back of my excellent New York Review of Books edition makes a point of describing this as an uncommon biography. Perhaps it is, but only because its subject is unknown to all but a few of us. Mrs Meredith is much less famous than the 2 men with whom she's identified. And identified with them only because Diane Johnson brings it to our attention. She was Mary Ellen Peacock who married one of the lesser lives of the biography, Edward Nicolls of the Royal Marines. Widowed after 2 years, the young Mary Ellen married George Meredith. We know him as the celebrated novelist, author of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. What makes Mary Ellen stand out is that she chose to leave him for another man, the painter Henry Wallis. We know him, too, the painter of The Death of Chatterton, a work in which Wallis used Meredith as the model for the suicidal poet Thomas Chatterton. Unhappy with Meredith, Mary Ellen's life with Wallis was clouded by the husband's refusal to let her see their son, Arthur, after the separation and by her advancing renal disease which killed her at 40, leaving Wallis with their own 3-year old son, Felix.

The sons are only 2 of the lesser lives the biography concerns itself with. The poet Thomas Love Peacock, her father, George Meredith, and Henry Wallis her lover are the "greater," famous lives of the story around which the lesser lives of Mary Ellen's story revolve. They include siblings, mothers, servants, friends, writers, politicians, and everyone else Johnson has dug up in her research to highlight as part of Mary Ellen's life. One of her purposes is to make us aware of these lives so that they share some of the prominence the famous enjoy. They're recognized as strands of the webs making up the other lives. Johnson has carefully made the effort to weave the facts of their lives into Mrs Meredith's. Another purpose, I think, is to describe the Victorian world these people--characters--lived in. Mary Ellen's bold decisions were unconventional in an age when women were overshadowed by their men, their work restricted to the domestic, the details of their lives hidden. They weren't allowed to own property, and in the unusual event of a broken marriage in Victoria's Britain, they weren't even, as Mary Ellen found out, allowed to keep their children. Johnson's masterly combination of biography, history, and feminism allows Mary Ellen to emerge from the Victorian fog and take shape in an age more forgiving of her actions. She's written a fascinating book.

[Christopher (Donut) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this years ago, so this is not a fresh evaluation.

I was interested in the connection between Thomas Love Peacock and George Meredith, who married Peacock's daughter. The marriage was unhappy, and Mrs. Meredith wound up living with the painter Henry Wallis (Meredith was the model for Wallis's most famous painting, "The Death of Chatterton").

As memory serves, Diane Johnson's arch tone, a sedulous imitation of Lytton Strachey, was very irritating, at times insufferable. Only Mencken can write like Mencken, and only Strachey can (or should) write like Strachey.

[Madisen (plathgirly) · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5
idk

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's impressive how much research must have gone into this book in an effort to put the pieces of a life together from scraps and notes. Written from a feminist perspective, and looking at the 'lesser lives' of people overshadowed by looming personalities and notables, it became engaging as it went along.
The author sets out to illuminate the life of a (somewhat) ordinary person who lived in the shadows of well-known men, but who in herself is a smart, worthwhile, lovely and independent person, who declined to play the unhappy role society would have of her. Mary Ellen Peacock, who first becomes Mrs. Nicholls, then the wife of the aspiring writer George Meredith, some years her junior.
The impression is that Meredith is quickly infatuated by her intelligence and independent spirit, and likely thinks himself modern in marrying an older woman who isn't just a docile household help, only to rue it as time goes by and Mary Ellen can't disregard her own needs and desires in service to his. A lot of this is speculation, though it is clear that they had money problems that she also worked to alleviate, and he devoted himself only to writing.
For reasons we can't fully know, the marriage disintegrates and Mary Ellen does the unthinkable -- becomes an adulteress and has an illegitimate child, a few years before dying of renal failure.
As much as it was about life it was also very much about death. The book winds down with a generation aging, sorrowing and dying.
It's a touching story really, for all its scholarship and famous figures, an interesting picture of an era in a particular pocket of society.

[Kari · Rating 4 out of 5]

She had confidence in her own resiliency and gifts of mind. Refused to accept a condition of life that bound people together in loveless chains. She had a little money; she could write; she did not care about public opinion. Mary Ellen thought of herself as a person, as Victorian women often did not. pg 125

[Olga Vannucci · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lesser life is not at all,
If it's your own, a life that's small.

[Conor]

Dripping with Victorian melancholy, yet mixed with a modern lack of sentimentality, to produce a strange gallery of half-portraits. That's the key: Johnson argues for genuine historical difference, transparent with her presentist construction of a fiction while also championing a head-spinning level of attention to historical detail. If I have a critique, it's the extent to which Johnson deploys primary sources and refrains from exegesis: on one hand, it works to show rather than tell, but on the other, it sometimes just sits there on the page without expanding or complicating our understanding of Mary Ellen. That is a petty complaint though.

What this book does for me is present a sensitive and gripping answer to why Britain lacked a nineteenth-century novel of adultery: a Madame Bovary or an Anna Karenina. Besides the fact that that label is a retrospective category, not a contemporary genre, Johnson shows how Victorians relentlessly elided "the correct" with "the good" in a way that impoverished the individual and societal acknowledgement of moral and emotional complexity. It also reveals a dominant paradigm for historiography—the great or greater life, a trunk, bearing the branches of lesser lives—and rather than repeating its mistakes just in a feminist context, lets her project spill out into a kind of archival arabesque. The beauty of the book—and it is a beautiful book—respects Johnson's enduring if grudging acknowledgement that our paraphernalia outlives us, betrays us, misrepresents us, snitches on us, encapsulates us, with far greater force than any hypothetical spiritual residue, whether we like it or not.

Throughout, I thought about what this book says about today. It is usually a reactionary right-wing talking point to bring up political correctness and cancel culture and all that jazz. I think they are lazy, and often ill-motivated, expressions of a grievance that can be expressed more carefully. Diane Johnson does not dedicate a section of her book to justifying adultery in abstract, ethical terms—nor does she burden the reader with too many potshots against Meredith (though the ones she includes are exciting). She is acidic, sure, but her defence of Mary Ellen ultimately does not rest on being found correct. Rather, she shows that we need not see people as correct, entirely ethically pure, to locate their dignity. I think of Sarah Schulman, writing in Conflict is Not Abuse about other people are real—that strangely simple statement that nevertheless stands for so much in thinking through how to do left politics better. Johnson's is not a call for vague humanism, liberalism, or worldwide hand-holding—nor is Schulman's, nor is mine—but for a more artistic-minded view of our societies: we construct our lives around fictions, as we do fictions around our lives, and their improvements are mutually dependent.

[Michael Reilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

The "Backlisted" podcast is my favorite source for recommendations of older books. I average four or five first rate books a year that I would never have read but for them being featured on the podcast. This 1972 book was featured in a recent episode.

This is a book about Mary Ellen Meredith, the first wife of the successful Victorian author George Meredith. It is not a traditional biography. It is more about how to think about her life.

Mary Ellen was the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, A well-known man of letters. In 1844 she married a dashing Navy Lieutenant. He died two months after the wedding while trying to save a drowning sailor from a capsized boat. Her daughter Edith was born seven months later.

In 1849 she married George Meredith. She was seven years older than him. They had a son, Arthur.
In 1858 she abandoned George for the painter Henry Wallis. She and Henry had a son, Harold. She and Harold never lived together because it was impossible to get a divorce in England. She was shunned by society and lived as a recluse until her death from disease in 1861 at the age of forty.

There were three mourners at her funeral. Neither her father, George nor Henry attended.

Johnson shows that Mary Ellen's story has always been told as the story of her as Meredith's first wife. She was significant because of the effect her scandalous behavior had on him. Johnson shows how difficult it is to find Mary Ellen's life. Meredith was given custody of their son Harold because she was considered obviously unfit to be a mother after abandoning her husband and taking up with another man.

Mary Ellen was an intelligent resourceful woman. She grew up in the literary world in her father's house. She knew Mary Shelly, John Stuart Mill and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She sold some of her writings after the split from Meredith to a magazine edited by Charles Dickens. She was a subject of gossip in the London literary scene.

Johnson's approach and form is what makes this a classic. This is Johnson's attempt to understand Mary Ellen and her world. She tells stories based on what she imagines. She discusses the difficulties with the few primary sources she has to rely on. She speculates about the parts we can never know. She follows the adult lives of Mary Ellen's children.

The tone is often conversational and almost playful but she is always mindful of the hardship at the middle of the story. For example, "A desperate woman had nothing on her side in Victorian England; so, most often, she stuck. Consequentially, either the Meredith marriage was unusually awful, or Mary Ellen was unusually independent." The honesty of the book is that Johnson admits that we cannot really know what happened in Mary Ellen's marriage. Meridith was mostly tight lipped about MaryEllen for the rest of his long life and Mary Ellen never seems to have discussed what happened. After Mary Ellen's death, George married a second wife who was 11 years younger than he was.

Mary Ellen shows up, very slightly disguised, in several of his novels, never as a good or sympathetic character.

The footnotes are a bonus. Johnson has some fascinating discursive footnotes about interesting stuff she found while writing the book. She also names names of previous Meredith biographers who have gotten Mary Ellen wrong. She also has a brilliant five-page essay on literary biography, disguised as footnote 6. She ends it with "the biographer must be a historian, but also a novelist and a snoop."

This is a book that I enjoyed reading slowly. The story is fascinating. The speculation and imagination are exciting. The style and brio are exciting. There is an excellent paperback edition released by New York Review Books

[Elderberrywine · Rating 5 out of 5]

That's her on the cover, lower left hand corner. The first Mrs. George Meredith, nee Mary Ellen Peacock. This biography, written in 1972 by early feminist Diane Johnson, is wonderfully quirky and fascinating.

Mary Ellen, to give her the only name that was truly hers, was not famous in her own right, but was what I'd call famous-adjacent. Her father was the Romantic poet Thomas Love Peacock, who, whilst rambling about Wales in search of dramatic scenery, met Jane Gryffydh, daughter of a vicar of a tiny Welsh village. She was good-looking, somewhat well-read, and was acceptable company for a week or two, but then he left. Eight years later, with no correspondence in the meantime, he returned to marry her. And she was in her late twenties, living in poverty with her widowed mother and facing the life of an old maid, so she accepted. By the time Mary Ellen was a young girl, she had gone mad, and was sent off a la Jane Eyre. Not long after, she was dead.

Mary grew up in the writer's circle consisting of her father and many of the Shelly/Byron contingent, dabbling a bit herself. She married a naval officer who drowned three months later, but not before helping create baby Edith. For several years, she was comfortably well off as a widow, and helped start up and write for some small literary magazines, and in the process, met the much younger George Meredith.

Eventually, she relented and married him (baby Arthur!), but before too long, they had drifted apart. However, she had met the painter Henry Wallis by then, and they went off to Wales together (baby Felix!) and remained together off and on for the rest of her life, which was not long. She died at forty from renal disease.

The fascinating thing about her is that she apparently did what she wanted, with whom she wanted, and could give a toss about the Victorian mores of her time. She loved babies, even though she wasn't always allowed to keep them (poor Arthur ended up having a fairly unhappy life). She wrote and was published, even though some guy's name was frequently attached instead of hers. She started a cooking school, rather unheard of at the time, that flourished. And I love the picture of her because that is the woman (in her late 30's at the time) that I absolutely can imagine, going about her way.

A fun read. She might have had a short life, but she got every bit she could out of it.

[Eleanor Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like picking up a New York Review Book title that I am completely unfamiliar with. I am always pleased. The True History of Mrs. Meredith is usually the kind of book that least interests me--a biography of a historical figure--and I wouldn't have chosen it without the "nyrb" on the spine.

But the first page captured my attention and I was entertained all the way through.

Mary Ellen, the daughter of a famous writer and the first wife of another famous writer is a "lesser life" made more obscure by her involvement in an embarrassing (for her husband) scandal.

In the past few years I've watched a lot of documentaries reinterpreting the stories of publicly maligned women (Monica Lewinsky, Tonya Harding, the women in R Kelly's life) so I am primed to take Johnson's point.

"Mrs. Meredith's life can be looked upon...as an episode in the lives of Meredith or Peacock, but it cannot have seemed that way to her."

[Pascale · Rating 3 out of 5]

An unusual piece of scholarship from somebody I associated with chick lit (how's that for a stereotype?). Johnson meets the challenge of devoting a whole biography to an interstitial figure, Mary Ellen, who was the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, a poet, essayist, and satirical novelist but also, like Anthony Trollope later, a high-profile civil servant. After a tragically short first marriage, Mary Ellen became the wife of George Meredith, who was barely 20 when they met, with no money and little prospects. After innumerable pregnancies the marriage produced one viable son, Arthur, who was often looked after by the parents of Mary Ellen's first husband. Meredith had a delicate stomach and failed to appreciate Mary Ellen's cooking which seems to have been unusually delicious by British standards of the time. Money issues plagued the couple for years, until Mary Ellen had had enough and started an affair with Henry Wallis, a young well-to-do artist who was a friend of theirs and had used George as a model for his most famous painting, "The Death of Chatterton". Mary Ellen bore him a son officially named Harold but always referred to as Felix. They travelled to Capri but never had the chance to live together because Mary Ellen died prematurely of kidney failure. Neither her father nor her lover came to her funeral, a fact which led all previous historians to conclude that Mary Ellen had been disowned by all and sundry, as was customary in Victorian times for adulterous women. However, Johnson believes that Mary Ellen wasn't a pariah among her own set and that her father, who had been a close friend of the notoriously iconoclastic Shelley's, was distraught by her early death. According to her research, Wallis was a much better father to Felix than Meredith was to Arthur, whom he banished to a school in Germany as soon as he had a new wife. Biographies of under appreciated women have become something of a sub-genre in recent decades but back in 1972 when this book first came out Johnson was quite the pioneer. She does a beautiful job of resurrecting not only Mary Ellen and her 3 children (she had a daughter by her first husband) but many other figures who lived and died without achieving anything special other than spending some time on earth, mostly in fear, discomfort and sorrow, occasionally in hope and joy.

[Cyber Dot]

On a recent Zoom interview with the Harvard Book Store, author Charles Mann gave this book a shout out as his favorite pandemic read because it "gives ink" to those who seldom get any. The subtitle "and Other Lesser Lives" is well chosen. The beauty of this book is Johnson's challenge of what a biography does and doesn't do for the readers' understanding of its subjects. And, as importantly, how a biography slights the rightful memories of everyone left out, i.e., the "lesser lives", the supporting cast.

A provocative take away is the shift of the pendulum in England from the 18th century's relaxed social mores, to the restrictions and guilt of the Victorian Era in the 19th century. Johnson posits that her star actor, Mary Ellen Peacock (the "First Mrs. Meredith") was not born too soon, but rather, too late.

[Gerardine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Ellen Peacock, daughter of the famous gothic novelist, Thomas Love Peacock, met and married the up and coming victorian novelist, George Meredith, famous for “The Ordeal Of Richard Feverel”, and “The Egoist”. Their circle included well known names, Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Dante Gabriel Rosetti . For a while the marriage prospered, but lack of money, and George’s slow progress in establishing his career lead to unhappiness and petulance.
Mary Ellen eloped with Henry Wallis, painter of “The Death Of Chatterton” (George Meredith was the model), and of the famous “Dead Stonebreaker”. The book is full of interesting snippets of gossip, of letters, contemporary news clippings, and advertisements.
At times the author surmises, rather than reports. However, at the same time she takes us into a busy literary era where brief, victorian lives are opened to us.

[Chris]

Diane Johnson has written a fantastic biography of, well, several people, and critically looks at “biography”.
Biography is in the eye of the beholder she contends, what is said, what is not, about the subject and those around the subject. The biographer creates the life, it seems.
Johnson looks critically at the Victorian times that subjugated women and exalted a morality that subjugated everyone.
It is a valuable text for revealing the biases that color our contemporary view of those women that came before us.
Johnson’s tone is enjoyable for its iconoclasm, though it does get petulant over the 192+ pages.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A charming feminist biography in the literary style of Lytton Strachey - lots of funny asides and speculation - but I applaud Diane Johnson for taking as her subject the disgraced, short-lived Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith, ill-fated wife of one of the great Victorian novelists. Great Victorian novelist and an utter pill, we find: dyspeptic, difficult; hypocritical; terrible with his children. One of the pleasures of this book is how much the reader gets to hate George Meredith (whose novels, by the way, are indeed quite good.)

[Juliana]

read if
✅ you’re curious about the shift between 18th-century Shelley-Byron libertines and 19th-century prudish Victorians
✅ you like biographies with some experimental flair to them
✅ you like tales of dashing heroines (even if the ending is not of the happy kind)

don’t read if
❌ you don’t care for the history of literature
❌ you think adultery and out-of-wedlock affairs are not topics for intellectual exploration
❌ you look for clear villains in biographies

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unconventional biography of the wife of Victorian author, George Meredith. This tells the story of Mary Ellen and the people she (and her husband) are associated with, who are often more interesting in the famous Victorian author.

This is a key text for feminists and biographers, and a great lead-up read to Victober!

[Paul Xanders · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterwork of remaking biography by extending compassion to every figure involved, as much compassion and interest as the historical record will allow. Movingly illustrates the total evidence a single life leaves behind, in which context the fact that Johnson's work is relatively short for a biography also becomes moving.

[Maeve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another recommendation from the Backlisted podcast. This is how biographies should be written—including the wondering of the biographer. Why do people do what they do? What makes one life greater and one life lesser—particularly when the lesser life seems to have had a large impact on the greater one.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Understandably a widely admired model for how and why to engage with "Lesser Lives," or fascinating historical figures (especially women) in the orbits of "Great Men." Johnson's endnotes are especially compelling in this regard, but the main text can drag a bit, especially when she devotes pages at a time to direct quotations.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate the spirit of this work, with its premise that "a lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one." There are passages of wit and intelligence. Vivian Gornick's introduction brings out the important structural conceit of moving between lives seamlessly, so as to mix up the "lesser" and the "great." But as a whole, the book is disjointed and often glib.

[Adam Burnett · Rating 3 out of 5]

A witty, dispassionate, and haltingly rendered fragementary biography of Mary Ellen Meredith, daughter and wife to respectively famed individuals. Mostly engrossing, until it isn’t, and certainly innovative, until it doesn’t matter.

[Heather Roche · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not really a biography of a specific person as much as it is of Victorians. I can't really stop thinking of the ways in which she shows us how the Victorians were not like us... Feels a bit like I've encountered an alien species. Rather magnificent book though. Very alive.

[Kathleen Flynn]

This wry and opinionated not-exactly-biography was very entertaining on the heels of Parallel Lives and made me want to re-read Diane Johnson's wonderful novels. Also, George Meredith.

[Bonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Johnson takes a fascinating angle on biography, detouring toward all manner of side-trips about Victorian personnages and mores. I will read this one again.

[Michael Flick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pejorative title aside, biography of an unhappy and evidently frustrated Victorian woman who had the sense and courage to abandon her husband, but that didn’t solve anything. Sad.

[Mimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir of a woman born into the wrong century, she would have been ok in the 18th or 20th but not when women were mainly the property of men and divorce scandalous, 3.8

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a lapsed victorian studies major in college,,,

[Matthew Sims · Rating 3 out of 5]

Age-old tale of misunderstood woman cheating on her husband, blaming him for it and calling it feminism.