A classic of alternative biography and feminist writing, this
empathetic and witty book gives due to a lesser figure of history, Mary
Ellen Peacock Meredith, who was brilliant, unconventional, and at odds
with the constraints of Victorian life.
"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.
