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A critical edition of a work by one of the premier writers of the nineteenth century. Diana of the Crossways is one of George Meredith's most popular and critically acclaimed novels. When the book was first published in 1885, George Meredith was well known as an advocate for the rights of women. He encouraged their legal emancipation and women's suffrage. His writings reveal his sense of the injustice suffered by women because of constraints on their natural abillties. Diana of the Crossways illustrates a Victorian woman in the process of change as the attempts independence. The problems she faces offer a distinct departure from the treatment of conventional heroines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Meredith understood and wrote so well about the conflicts women faced that Diana of the Crossways depicts the struggles that led to a new ferninism. Nikki Lee Manos's introduction draws upon a wide range of historical and critical texts, from John Stuart Mill's feminist tract of 1869 to Mary Poovey's contemporary theorles about gender in Victorian fiction. Diana of the Crossways is a central text for the study of nineteenth-century representation of women and the Victorian wo… (more)
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George Meredith was a close friend of Norton’s and so this novel portrays Caroline (renamed
Instead, he spends a lot of time in this book dissecting his main character and the motives for her decisions. Meredith also extracts a lot from the writing of “Diana,” which got a bit tedious after a while; and the book is overtly feminist in a lot of places (for example, at one point Meredith—not Meredith writing as Diana—predicts that one day women will be encouraged to have professions, which is no big deal nowadays but back then must have seemed preposterous). However, the novel highlights the position that women had in Victorian society, which is sometimes interesting. On the other hand, George Meredith’s writing style is very, very hard to read, which is probably why this novel, and why this kind of novel, has become deeply unfashionable.