Word: egoist
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...also something of an early feminist; indeed, it was part of his literary credo that comedy could not exist without equality of the sexes. Among Victorian writers, he was conspicuous for creating women characters who could think -"the lady with brains," as he described his heroine in The Egoist. Meredith married one himself-the daughter of another comic novelist, Thomas Love Peacock. She collaborated with him on a study of the art of cookery, bore him a son, then deserted him for a painter...
...Meredith's case, the style was truly the reflection of the man. For all his sermons against the sin of pride, he was an egoist writing about egoism. Thus the modern reader of his books is nearly suffocated by the presence of Mine Host, nudging, lecturing, possessed, as the novelist himself confessed, by the "cursed desire to show the reason." Nonetheless, it was Meredith's "splendid vanity," concludes Pritchett, that gave him the strength to put his contradictions on the line and struggle to resolve them. That, for Meredith, was what it meant to write a novel...