Meredith George Livres

The first 1995 cover edition with the title on blue background is here. Virginia Woolf said of The Egoist: 'Meredith pays us a supreme compliment to which as novel-readers we are little accustomed ... He imagines us capable of disinterested curiosity in the behaviour of our kind.' In this, the most dazzlingly intellectual of all his novels, Meredith tries to illuminate the pretensions of the most powerful class within the very citadel of security which its members have built. He develops to their logical extremity his ideas on egoism, on sentimentality and on the power of comedy. Meredith saw egoism as the great enemy of truth, feeling and progress, and comedy as the great dissolver of artifice. The Egoist is the extreme expression of his recurrent theme: the defeat of egoism by the power of comedy.

This novel follows the fortunes of a young man who struggles to overcome his humble origins and enter the upper echelons of society. Along the way, he falls in love with a wealthy heiress and must navigate the complexities of class and social expectations. George Meredith was a Victorian-era writer known for his psychological insight and social commentary.