Belated Recognition

The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives by Diane Johnson. NYRB Classics, 2020, $17.95 paper.

INITIALLY PUBLISHED in 1972 and nominated for a National Book Award in 1973, Diane Johnson’s The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives is a gem: tart, canny, and unaccountably out of print for many years, but as fresh and wry and vital today as when it first appeared.

Partly it’s the story of Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls Meredith, the first wife of the novelist George Meredith. Though she was largely ignored in the Victorian biographies of her eminent husband, Mary Ellen had a hold on Meredith’s imagination. (For one thing, he wrote the sonnet cycle , about the protracted end of a marriage—presumably theirs.) But he pretended she didn’t exist, or didn’t speak of her except now and then to say she was insane. His admirers followed suit, relegating her to a single page or to a footnote. After all, she’d committed the unpardonable sin: she’d run off with a painter,