Modern Love

by George Meredith

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, Victorian, 19th Century, British Literature, Literature

56 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1862

About the author

George Meredith of Britain wrote novels, such as The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), and poetic works, including Modern Love (1862).

During the Victorian era, Meredith read law, and people articled him as a solicitor, but shortly after marrying Mary Ellen Nicolls, a 30-year-old widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, in 1849 at 21 years of age, he abandoned that profession for journalism.

He collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, into Poems, which was published to some acclaim in 1851. His wife left him and their five-year old son in 1858; she died three years later. Her departure was the inspiration for The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), his first "major novel." It was considered a breakthrough novel, but its sexual frankness caused a scandal and prevented it from being widely read.

As an advisor to publishers, Meredith is credited with helping Thomas Hardy start his literary career, and was an early associate of J. M. Barrie. Before his death, Meredith was honored from many quarters: he succeeded Lord Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors; in 1905 he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII.

His works include: The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), Farina (1857), Vittoria (1867) and The Egoist (1879). The Egoist is one of his most enduring works.

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

George^Meredith

Reviews

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

When reading Michael Dirda's Classics for Pleasure, I came across his essay on George Meredith, a 19th century English writer. I probably would have read and enjoyed the essay and then moved on but for the fact that Dirda dwelt on Meredith's 50-sonnet cycle of poems that detailed the break up of his first marriage. A subject quite unusual for Victorian England. In fact, a subject most unusual for any period before our modern era of the tell-all memoir.

Being a divorce' myself and titillated by the brief excerpts Dirda reproduced, I surfed over to the Gutenberg Project site and downloaded a copy of Modern Love.

And glad I am that I did. Dirda is right to celebrate the poet's honesty and insight into the birth, life and death of Love. While I'm going to have to read the cycle again (and again) to fully appreciate it, several sonnets immediately touched me:

IV. ...Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold, / And the great price we pay for it full worth: / We have it only when we are half earth. / Little avails that coinage to the old!

VIII. ...Where came the cleft between us? Whose the fault? / My tears are on thee, that have rarely dropped as balm for any bitter wound of mine: / My breast will open for thee at a sign! / But, no: we are two reed pipes, coarsely stopped: / The God once filled them with his mellow breath; / And they were music till he flung them down, / Used! Used! Hear now the discord-loving clown / Puff his gross spirit in them, worse than death!...

XV. ...Her own handwriting to me when no curb / Was left on Passion's tongue. She trembles through, / A woman's tremble - the whole instrument: - / I show another letter lately sent. / The words are very like: the name is new.

XLIII. ...I see no sin: / The wrong is mixed. In tragic life, God wot, / No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: / We are betrayed by what is false within.

XLVIII. Our inmost hearts had opened, each to each. / We drank the pure daylight of honest speech. / Alas! that was the fatal draught, I fear....

and

L. ...Then each applied to each that fatal knife, / Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole. / Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul / When hot for certainties in this our life!....

And there are other sonnets that touched me, too. Like XXXIV, where the spouses skirt around the issue of their estrangement; or XVI, where Meredith, in an unguarded moment, says "Ah, yes! / Love dies," and only later realizes that this is when the "red chasm" began to grow.

I'm sufficiently impressed by this author to search out more of his work (though I fear I'll have to wait until the To-Read shelf becomes a bit less crowded).

[Jacob Krause · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can tell how new a thing this was, and how controversial Meredith must have known it would be, in the way his brilliant, lucid, lightning-lit outbursts frequently retreat into what, for me, were sections of indistinct jibber-jabbering. It was as if his courage to voice the harsh truth only lasted so long, and had to be recharged by dipping into a bitter well, which dippings were full of opaque and insubstantial references to symbols and bits of history that must have had intense personal significance, but for a (currently) modern reader, 150 years later, felt like dead spots, as if all that Victorian tip-toeing wore soft spots in the meaning, and those spots had since gone to rot. If the final stanzas weren't one of those spots, if it had ended with something honest instead of vague images of poetic mainstays, I'd have walked away with the frisson I had in the middle, instead of the feeling I now have: like there must have been more than 50 stanzas, right?, he can't have meant to end there, could he?

[Katie Lumsden · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read. Not as mind-blowing as his novel The Egoist, but some of the sonnets are very well written with poignant moments.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Modern Love is a cycle of fifty beautifully composed sonnets. They are some of the most psychologically astute and realistic poems ever written. That Meredith was able to discover the truth of his pain, of failed love and complex desire, in the form of the sonnet; and to carry out this excavation continually, each poem feeling entirely new, unprecedented, both doleful and vigorous, is remarkable to me. Modern Love stands alone in Victorian Literature, and speaks ably to our age. It may be some of the first "confessional" poetry in the modern sense, i.e. not religiously so. Look in these pages and see an original form of the voice that assesses the lived emotional reality of itself – of what Plath and Lowell would later make their own – of a voice who's seen poetry turn ever more deeply towards the unique experience of the individual.

[Edwin John Moorhouse Marr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just so wonderfully bitter. To write one brilliant sonnet is a fantastic achievement, to write 50, one after the other, is something entirely more incredible. I just love the tone of this, sad and bitter, and yet bittersweet and at times, humorous. You feel the author's pain and suffering, and you feel the growing acceptance of the situation, it is important to remember just how revolutionary this collection is, a man writing about a woman leaving him for another man, a woman actually walking out on her husband, all of this is incredible for a mid Victorian text, it is so liberating and interesting to see a man, particularly of this time period, be open about his emotions and suffering. A really wonderful collection, and one that is well worth reading.

[Adriana]

The Poetry Foundation led me to this, and I am very grateful.

This is great, just be aware of the backstory. A painter asked George Meredith to pose as a model for one of his paintings, and he did. Then Meredith's wife ran off with the painter. Modern Love is Meredith's response.

Enjoy.

[Susan L · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bitter Mr. Meredith....very bitter. Damning, insightful sonnet cycle chronicling disintegration of dysfunctional Victorian marriage

[Eric · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very unintelligible, especially despite reading this twice.

[Shouvik Hore · Rating 1 out of 5]

As a collection, it is below par. it is a book with two and a half great sonnets and with nothing else of any value.

[Ostap Bender · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was nice to read ‘Modern Love’ in an edition from 1892 that was inscribed as a gift to someone from February of that same year, and with a dried flower between two of its pages, imagining the day over a hundred years ago when it was placed there.

The 50 sonnet poem speaks of an unfortunate universal truth: marriage going stale with time. Placed in Victorian England with the societal restrictions at the time, the result is not hostility or divorce, but something far worse: indifference. As the narrator sarcastically laments, “O, look we like a pair who for fresh nuptials joyfully yield all else?”

Both silently wear a mask, “wishing for the sword that severs all”, and meanwhile having affairs. To guests, they play the “Hiding the Skeleton” game, and in the course of the evening those visitors will see “Love’s corpse-light shine”. The unhappiness both feel is not spoken of directly until the end, and even then, it can’t save them from remaining chained to one another.

The poem is made more poignant in learning that Meredith’s wife had run off with another man four years before he wrote it in 1862, leaving him heartbroken and disillusioned. What shocked society when it was published was less that he drew directly from his own marital experiences, but that he could admit what many felt, that some are bound in passionless marriages, that it’s difficult to remain in love in ‘modern’ times, and that it’s tragic that people feel forced to continue on with one another when they’re both miserable.

The feelings certainly come across, but it’s a little hard to follow the meaning of the Victorian poetry at times, with word patterns a bit forced to complete its rhymes. The result is that it doesn’t stand up quite as well as others do with age, but it’s relatively short and worth reading.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

One would think I don’t have much to say because I read this a while ago, but it didn’t even leave enough of an immediate impression, beyond seeming pretty lackluster to me. It’s surprising that Meredith’s prose is so poetically miraculous, and yet this sonnet sequence read so prosaically, in a bad sense! I was disappointed that my foray into Meredith’s verse wasn’t as divine as my experience with The Egoist, especially given that I found his Essay on Comedy weaker than the novel too. The actors here, identified by pronouns or epithets like “lady” or “madam,” were difficult to keep straight at times, the syntax was occasionally stilted, and the poems were stiff on the whole.

[Drew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I first became aware of Meredith's sonnet cycle in a review of my own book "Infinity Standing Up" which similarly charts a love relationship that's soured and while I admired the way this poet builds his story throughout "Modern Love," I never quite got past the Romantic literary flourishes that even by late 19th-century standards strike me as out-of-date. Lines and phrases flash with an individual brilliance but no single poem reconciles the stiff formality with the embittered pain. Fascinating but not fulfilling.

[lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very deep, emotional, profound and moving poem by Meredith, exploring the break down of a marriage and how hard it is to become an individual again. I just think it was a little boring and dry at times. For a poem, I found the rhythm hard to follow at times, which made reading it quite difficult and unfulfilling.

I'm not the biggest fan of poetry as it is, and I think the length and stuffiness of this made it even more difficult to read than usual, so yeah. Not the best.

[lily 🪴 · Rating 3 out of 5]

cool but why the fuck was I told to read this. what does this have to do with confrontational and uncomfortable 90s theatre Mark?? was it to drive me to suicide like Kane herself?? because that’s where I’m at with the amount of poems you keep setting me because again: IM WRITING ABOUT A PLAY WHAT THE FUCK

[Osian · Rating 3 out of 5]

ALMOST a 4 star.
this is a really awesome cycle of sonnets, just deeply commanding and gorgeously written. some sonnets were a little turgid and unnecessary to the overall collection though, and while they are all at the very least pleasant, i think it would have been stronger with some revisoon. well good poems anyway and a re read will be fun

[Rao Javed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth reading and rereading especially for the one who have an idealistic perspective about love.

[Hans Ostrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't read this edition. A Victorian sonnet sequence about a failing marriage. Counter-melodramatic.

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sorry, maybe it's me, but I don't understand your poems

[Isabella · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[David Madden]

The power of these love poems is stunning.