Diana of the Crossways: A Novel

By George Meredith

Book Overview

A critical edition of a work by one of the premier writers of the nineteenth century. Diana of the Crossways is one of George Meredith's most popular and critically acclaimed novels. When the book was first published in 1885, George Meredith was well known as an advocate for the rights of women. He encouraged their legal emancipation and women's suffrage. His writings reveal his sense of the injustice suffered by women because of constraints on their natural abillties. Diana of the Crossways illustrates a Victorian woman in the process of change as the attempts independence. The problems she faces offer a distinct departure from the treatment of conventional heroines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Meredith understood and wrote so well about the conflicts women faced that Diana of the Crossways depicts the struggles that led to a new ferninism. Nikki Lee Manos's introduction draws upon a wide range of historical and critical texts, from John Stuart Mill's feminist tract of 1869 to Mary Poovey's contemporary theorles about gender in Victorian fiction. Diana of the Crossways is a central text for the study of nineteenth-century representation of women and the Victorian wo

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814328946
• ISBN13: 9780814328941
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Length: 365 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Diana of the Crossways

When George Meredith published Diana of the Crossways in 1855 he had a huge hit on his hands, partly because he chose a notorious woman for his heroine - novelist, poet, and essayist Caroline Norton (1808-77), granddaughter of Irish playwright Richard Brimsley Sheridan. At nineteen she married an awful man, George Norton, who beat her, but she gave birth to three sons during this unfortunate alliance. Seemingly with the approval of her husband, beautiful and witty Caroline, a major flirt, then took up with influential politician Lord Melbourne. (Melbourne, soon to be Prime Minister, liked literary women; he had been married to Lady Caroline Lamb, the Lord Byron intimate who famously deemed the poet "mad, bad, and dangerous to know.") But Caroline's husband sued Melbourne for "criminal conversation" in 1836 - and lost - and Dickens fictionalized the very public trial in The Pickwick Papers. Caroline left Norton, and published several influencial pamphlets after discovering women were not permitted to file for divorce or seek custody of their children. A second scandal cemented Caroline's reputation as a bad girl. While involved with Secretary of War Sidney Herbert, she was suspected of tipping off The Times (perhaps for money) that the 1846 Corn Laws were about to be repealed. Herbert stopped seeing her, and she kept a somewhat lower profile after that. George Meredith has met Caroline a few times, and freely admitted to stealing the details of her life to create the immensely likable Diana. (He says he made her smarter, though.) After the novel's success dredged up colorful stories once more, Caroline's family forced him to add a disclaimer: "The story of Diana of the Crossways is to be read as fiction." But while several biographies of Caroline Norton exist, it is only in Meredith's novel that this early feminist hero comes fully alive. --- from book's back cover