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

Johnson, Diane

ISBN 10: 0434376922 / ISBN 13: 9780434376926

Published by William Heinemann Ltd, London, 1973

About this Item

First UK edition hardcover in very good condition. Clipped dust jacket in acceptable condition. From the private collection of Dame Carmen Callil, publisher, writer, critic and founder of Virago Press, with her bookplate on the front pastedown. Jacket is sunned, with a large, taped tear to the rear lower edge and spine foot, and creases to the front inner flap. Edges are creased and torn, including chips. Board corners and spine ends are bumped. Page block is tanned and blemished. Binding is sound and pages are clear. LW.

Seller Inventory # 622185

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives
• Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd, London
• Publication Date: 1973
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0434376922
• ISBN 13: 9780434376926
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition UK.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Acceptable
• Book Type: Used
• Seller catalogs:
  • Biographies

About this title

Synopsis

“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.