ABSTRACT

This chapter presents George Meredith's first full-length novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, which explores a son's sexual reproduction as a by-product of his father's textual production. It explains Meredith's final novel, The Amazing Marriage, which duplicates the aims and objectives of the first work, but with the sex/text narrative focused on daughters rather than sons. The chapter also presents Meredith's novels offer a trial run for a different kind of narration that would live out Coleridge's statement in Table Talk that 'a great mind must be androgynous'. Many of Meredith's novels center on texts-within-texts, often works written by, or consulted by, fathers and father figures. For Meredith, linguistic distinctions between genders occasionally eclipse physical differences. Meredith begins his engagement with realist fiction with a novel about a spectacularly failed heterosexual union, poorly plotted by a father's conduct book and the conventions of multiple outdated literary genres.