True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives

True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives
Vivian Gornick, Diane Johnson
RRP:
NZ$ 37.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 29.60
Paperback
h203 x 127mm - 256pg
23 Jun 2020 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9781681374451
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Many people have described the Famous Writer presiding at his dinner table. . . . He is famous; everybody remembers his remarks. . . . We forget that there were other family members at the table-a quiet person, now muffled by time, shadowy, whose heart pounded with love, perhaps, or rage. " So begins The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, an uncommon biography devoted to one of those "lesser lives. " As the author points out, "A lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one. " Such sympathy and curiosity compelled Diane Johnson to research Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith (1821-1861), the daughter of the famous artist Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) and first wife of the equally famous poet George Meredith (1828-1909). Her life, treated perfunctorily and prudishly in biographies of Peacock or Meredith, is here exquisitely and unhurriedly given its due. What emerges is the portrait of a brilliant, well-educated woman, raised unconventionally by her father only to feel more forcefully the constraints of the Victorian era. First published in 1972, Lesser Lives has been a key text for feminists and biographers alike, a book that reimagined what biography might be, both in terms of subject and style. Biographies of other "lesser" lives have since followed in its footsteps, but few have the wit, elegance, and empathy of Johnson' s seminal work.
"This book, which I first knew decades ago under the title Lesser Lives, had an enormous impact on my thinking and career. The title alone projected so strongly the then-radical idea that there is always someone else in the room with the Famous Person who feels as intensely as the Famous Person but whose story is ignored. We learned from it that telling someone' s story was a political act. A wave of superb feminist books was based on this insight which then entered the mainstream and can be seen in ways as diverse as the New York Times' s ' Ignored No More' column and in Hamilton, when the Schuyler sisters wonder in song who will tell their story. Re-reading Diane Johnson' s masterpiece now, I appreciate more than ever its wit and generosity--the sheer delight to be found in the prose. In Diane Johnson' s hands, Mary Ellen Peacock turns out to be much more fun to read about than her Famous Husband. " --Phyllis Rose "This wonderful, ground-breaking biography looks not only at a Famous Victorian Writer, but at many of the even more interesting and sometimes much more likable people whose lives touched his. A real treat--even the notes are fun to read and often surprising. " --Alison Lurie "Johnson [has an] unusually wide-ranging skill as a writer . . . the striking originality of Lesser Lives no doubt explains the unusual vocabulary of compliments, not normally seen in reviews of nonfictional works. " --Carolyn A. Durham "[A] splendid biographical study . . . about figures on the fringes of the Romantic movement. " --The New York Times"Her originality and courage are evident in everything she writes . . . For Johnson, the most interesting person at the table was Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith, who died at 40 of renal disease after leaving her husband and being forcibly kept from seeing their son because of what her husband explained to the world as her immoral behavior . . . Lesser Lives freed up other writers to express [a] kind of democratic sympathy. " --Constance Casey, Los Angeles Times
Diane Johnson is a novelist and critic. She is the author of Lulu in Marrakech and Le Divorce, among other novels, and a memoir, Flyover Lives. She lives in Paris and San Francisco. Vivian Gornick is a journalist, essayist, and memoirist. She is the author of eleven books, most recently The Odd Woman and the City. She lives in New York.
Status: Indent title, imported to order
ISBN-13: 9781681374451
Published: 23 Jun 2020
Published In: United States
Imprint: The New York Review of Books Inc
Publisher: The New York Review of Books Inc
Format: Paperback
Height: 203mm
Width: 127mm
Pages: 256

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