We specialize in hard to find items
(1)
The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives (New York Review Books Classics)
Share Tweet
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About The True History Of The First Mrs. Meredith And
Product Description 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. Review “Johnson deftly spins the little that is definitively known about the life of Mary Ellen into a refractive portrait of a spirited, restless individual. But—like Phyllis Rose’s better-known multiple Victorian biography, ‘Parallel Lives,’ with which Johnson’s book shares a feminist sensibility and a bracingly subjective point of view—the book’s subject is also a consideration of the very project of biography, often elaborated in elegantly argued footnotes.” —Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker “First published in 1972, the book passed into obscurity and has been happily reissued . . . fresh as ever—a seething, stylish reclamation of a forgotten life.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times“Taking cue from Woolf's call, in A Room of One's Own, for women to write their forebears back into the record, Johnson's lively and intimate portrait offer a sly challenge of the assumption that, as Thomas Carlyle put it, 'the history of the world is but the biography of great men.' . . . There is no better advocate for biography's vitality as a creative art than Johnson's sensitive, profound and highly entertaining tapestry, no less resonant now than at its first publication.” — Francesca Wade , Times Literary Supplement “In encouraging us to give ourselves over to conjecture, [Johnson] asks us to redistribute the attention that would ordinarily funnel toward the person thought to be most important. It is exciting to read this way: We feel we are helping Johnson build a richer and more populous world than has been rendered before. . . . Lesser Lives is a corrective, resurfacing during a time when there is a greater demand for women’s stories in literature, particularly when there is the sense that a man’s story has won out over hers.” —Marie Solis , The Nation“She [Johnson] gives us a stirring tale of a headstrong girl, brought up under the old license of the 18th century but obliged to knuckle down to the stern realities of the new Victorian age.” —Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian"The fiercely partisan reading of Mary Ellen has struck a chord. Many a 'true history' deals with a fictional character, and indeed Johnson's Mary Ellen is partly her own creation, a nineteenth-century woman seen through twentieth-century eyes, Her biography vibrates with symptahy for her, and for the other women around her who had su
