Synopsis
Fine cloth copy in a near fine, very slightly edge-rubbed and dust-dulled dw, now mylar-sleeved. Remains particularly and surprisingly well-preserved; tight, bright, clean and sharp-cornered. ; 232 pages; Description: xiv, 232 p. Illus. 22 cm. Subjects: Meredith, Mary Ellen, 1821-1861. Meredith, George, 1828-1909 --Marriage. Wallis, Henry, b. 1830. Authors' spouses --Great Britain --Biography. Novelists, English --19th century.
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The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives
Published by
Knopf Incorporated, Alfred A., 1972
ISBN 10: 0394480341
ISBN 13: 9780394480343
Used
Hardcover
Seller: Better World Books, Mishawaka, IN, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: Good. Former library copy. Pages intact with minimal writing/highlighting. The binding may be loose and creased. Dust jackets/supplements are not included. Includes library markings. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good. Seller Inventory # 40647759-6
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LESSER LIVES: The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives
Published by
Alfred A. Knopf, 1972
ISBN 10: 0394480341
ISBN 13: 9780394480343
Used
Hardcover
First Edition
Seller: Remarks Used Books, Pittsfield, MA, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. 1st Edition. Stated First Edition. 232pp. Illustrated with 16 pages of halftones. Bright & tight hardcover, unread, in Very Good condition. Former used-book store copy (Filene's Basement?) bears pencil-price traces & slight shelfwear/front-boards smudges, o/w unmarked. "A figure in the shadow of great lives is brought into the foreground. Daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, wife of George Meredith, the beautiful and spirited Mary Ellen, whose fate it has been to be defined only as an accessory to her father and her husband, is seen in full human scale. And out of Diane Johnson's brilliantly innovative biography an extraordinary woman emerges, a new--a modern--Victorian heroine. [] Mary Ellen Peacock was raised by her father--novelist, poet, child of the Enlightenment, on close terms with John Stuart Mill, Shelley, Hunt, Hogg, et al.--to pursue both knowledge and life. Finding models in such family friends as the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the unfettered Claire Clairmont, she summoned up all her force, wit, and daring to break through the web of limitations nineteenth-century England was already imposing on its women. Her tempestuous, scandal-marked life has the dramatic content and tensions of a Victorian fiction conceived by a mid-twentieth-century sensibility. [] All is deftly conveyed. The precocious girlhood; the brief and tragic first love--her husband, Darling Eddy, lost at sea; the young widow left with an infant daughter. Then, the entrance of George Meredith, as yet a penniless outsider, ambitious, smitten by Mary Ellen (not only a beautiful, worldly woman, but an entree into the most desirable literary circles). Six proposals and he wins her. But . . . She cares nothing for society's canon--he everything. She writes poems, he publishes some of them under his own name. . . They sharpen their wits on each other. . . Out of the shambles of their marriage she leaps over the wall . . . But in the Victorian novel, love (if adulterous), the bearing of children (if illegitimate) must be paired with retribution--and so it is, though she remains to the end unfrightened, in command, her own woman. [] Telling her story, recreating the great and the lesser lives around her, Diane Johnson recovers for us a woman of intellect and imagination who, defying the mores of her time, speaks directly to the concerns of ours." [jacket copy] "Biography made jazzy, feminist and scathing."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post. "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. "A clever little book. . . a poignant needling, deflating the male creative genius--not ungenerously--and providing yet another plausible case of a wife abused by posterity. . . . With a nose for the pastness and otherness of the past, equal parts sour wit and quick sympathy, Johnson is just the right match for what's odd and sad in her Victorian story."--Tessa Hadley, London Review of Books. Very Good hardcover w/brilliant corners & crisp deckle edges, a square & tight binding, wrapped in a Good, intact jacket covered in archival mylar; off-white boards have, despite a smudged top edge, a haunting-embossed portrait of Mary Ellen, a nice Borzoi touch to a typically elegant Knopf production. Seller Inventory # RUB2826
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Lesser Lives
Seller: Tony Lamy Bookseller, Cincinnati, OH, U.S.A.
Seller rating 1 out of 5 stars
Hard Cover. First Edition. 1st printing. NF+/NF+. Seller Inventory # 26971
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The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives
Seller: BennettBooksLtd, Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! Seller Inventory # Q-0394480341