George Meredith was a lyrical yet searingly honest poet, and an influential novelist whose fiction distilled, contributed to and animated the major debates of the Victorian age. He became at once an arbiter of taste in his own times, and a trailblazer for modernism. In many ways an extraordinary, larger-than-life figure, he has always had his admirers, and critics have continued to be drawn to the biographical, socio-political, scientific and experimental aspects of his oeuvre. Some of his works, including the sonnets of Modern Love, his 'Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit', and...