The Egoist by George Meredith

In this 1879 novel, George Meredith turns the Victorian Marriage Plot on its end. Instead of a heroine trying to land a husband, we have a young lady trying to break it off with her fiance--for 600 pages and to great comic effect. Shortly after they become engaged, Clara Middleton realizes that her intended, Sir Willoughby Patterne, is a complete egoist. In other words, he cannot conceive of anyone not being enslaved by his charms, a view fostered by the adoration of the aunts who have reared him and the long-time worshipful admiration of a neighbor, Laetitia Dale. He judges others by how they will reflect on his personal glory, and thus he does not want to give up the beautiful and wealthy girl he mainly chose because so many other men wanted her.

In this day and time, engagements are broken with great abandon, but not so in the upper classes of Victorian England. A girl was considered almost as chattel, to be "given" by her father to her husband, and an engagement was considered almost as binding as marriage. Poor Clara cannot even get the support of her father, because Sir Willoughby lures him to his side with the enticements of his superb wine cellar.

Meredith highlights, with sensitivities unusual for his time, the unfortunate status of women, as they were almost universally considered as property to be passed from one male to another and as being childishly irrational, not capable of thinking and deciding for themselves.

The humor of the novel is most apparent in the many lengthy polite conversations, which are very clever and extremely funny. I am surprised that the BBC has not adapted this for television. It would make a great play.

I must admit that often Meredith was too intellectual for my understanding. Sometimes the plot seemed almost a digression from an essay he was writing. I had to read sentence after sentence multiple times to get the sense, and some passages still remained opaque as to meaning. This is not a quick or an easy read.

I would recommend this to readers who are fairly conversant with Victorian novels, as an amusing switch from the usual conventions.