MANY PEOPLE have described the Famous Writer presiding at his dinner table, in a clean neckcloth. He is famous; everybody remembers his remarks. He remembers his own remarks, being a writer, and notes them in his diary. We forget that there were other people at the table—a quiet person, now muffled by time, shadowy, whose heart pounded with love, perhaps, or rage, or fear when our writer shuffled in from his study; whose hands, white knuckled, twisted an apron, whose thoughts raced. Or someone who left the room with a full throat of sobs. Of course there is no way really to know the minds of Lizzie Rossetti, or the first Mrs. Milton, or all those silent Dickens children suffering the mad unkindness, the delirious pleasures of their terrifying father’s company—with little places of their own to put their small things away in, with small, terrified thoughts.
But we know a lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one. His life is very real to him; he is not a minor figure in it. He looks out of his eyes at our poet, our chronicled statesman; he feels the tears within himself and down his cheeks. All the days of his life we do not know about but he was doing something, anyway—something happy or bitter or merely dull. And he is our real brother.
It was sympathy, then, and curiosity that first sent me looking into the life of Mrs. Meredith. Subsequently I found a number of other, more respectable, historiographical, literary, even culinary reasons, to justify looking into her life, the people she and George Meredith knew, the things they did and thought.
I mean, of course, the first Mrs. Meredith, Mary Ellen, the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock. The second Mrs. Meredith was a plain, quiet woman, evidently even-tempered, because Meredith said that to argue with her was like “firing broadsides into a mud fort.” The first Mrs. Meredith was argumentative and beautiful, and never let loose her hold on the imagination of the great novelist—even though she died early, and he had come to hate her, and rarely spoke of her after her death, and then told people she was mad.
The life of Mary Ellen is always treated, in a paragraph or a page, as an episode in the lives of Peacock or Meredith. It was treated with a certain reserve in early biographies because it involves adultery and recrimination, and makes all the parties look ugly. More recent biographies of Meredith repeat the received version of the story with a certain brisk determination, a kind of feigned acceptance: we know that these things, regrettably, do indeed happen.
Mrs. Meredith’s life can be looked upon, of course, as an episode in the lives of Meredith or Peacock, but it cannot have seemed that way to her.