ABSTRACT
One of Our Conquerors is a deliberately experimental work; it lies close to the source of much that has proved most fruitful in the twentieth-century novel. It was serialized in I 8go, and first published in three volumes in 1891; its influence can be felt throughout the 18gos and beyond.1 Joyce, Forster, Lawrence, even T. S. Eliot seem to have drawn something creative from it. It is the apotheosis of the new artistic freedom which came to Meredith as the result of a legacy in the early 188os. He put this freedom to some curious uses. His late novels often seem cryptic, selfabsorbed, baulking our efforts as readers. But on re-reading the crabbedness obtrudes itself far less, the intelligence, the poignant consciousness of human complexity comes fully home.
