George Meredith

This guide is meant for readers who find George Meredith's novels hard going. It opens with a short overview of his aims and methods, but it does not attempt to explain his central ideas, which the reader must look for elsewhere. Instead, each novel is laid out plainly, tracing the sequence of events and the factual backbone of the plot, with a brief analysis and a few notes on its structure and content. The author explains that Meredith's style is often indirect, cryptic, or slippery, so a clear map of each story can help before a reader tackles the original.

The novels are covered in the order they were written and published rather than grouped by theme, a choice the author weighed before settling on it. Readers who finish with the plot summaries can then turn to the philosophy woven through the fiction or approach the books through the methods of literary criticism.