The books by George Meredith in fine bindings line shelves. In the cupboard in a velvet case lies a drawing from the hand of another young lover, of a beautiful, large-eyed woman smiling a little, demure in her bonnet. Perhaps the artist is saying something that causes her to forget, for a moment, some bitter things she has learned. His enamored pencil does not catch, perhaps, a certain fated expression in here eyes. Kisses, from whomever, have left no imprints on the pretty lips. The young lover sees only his own kisses there. She will die soon. He will grow old. All this is more than a hundred years ago now. “Earthly love speedily becomes unmindful but love from heaven is mindful for ever more,” it was to have said on her tombstone. No one knows where her grave is now.

Reading Diane Johnson’s The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith (and Other Lesser Lives) is a disorienting experience. You think you know what you’re getting into when you begin—or I thought so, anyway. It is, after all, a period piece: first published in 1972, it is an exemplary contribution to the second-wave feminist project of literary reclamation, of resistance to the domination of men’s voices and men’s stories. Its tone, a blend of sass, defiance, and earnestness, reflects both the exuberance and the imperfections of that moment and that movement. Johnson’s project, in this context, initially sounds predictable, which is not to say it doesn’t also sound necessary and valuable, precisely as an act of resistance. “The life of Mary Ellen,” Johnson explains in her Preface,

is always treated, in a paragraph or a page, as an episode in the lives of [Thomas Love] Peacock or [George] Meredith. It was treated with a certain reserve in early biographies because it involves adultery and recrimination, and makes all the parties look ugly . . .

Mrs. Meredith’s life can be looked upon, of course, as an episode in the lives of Meredith or Peacock, but it cannot have seemed that way to her.

We are inundated today with stories of just such “lesser lives,” real and fictional, including novels about real but sidelined figures like The Paris Wife or ones like The Silence of the Girls that shift our point of view on “minor” characters in the great classical epics. When the subject is real person, the underlying point is always, as Johnson notes, that it is impossible, or should be, for someone not to be the main character in their own life. The ease with which, even today, we relegate women to secondary status, especially when they are connected in some way to—especially when they are wives of—“great men” continues to be shocking, or it should be. “Must it always be this way for women?” wonder the ghosts of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley early in Johnson’s book; “Here was one they thought might persevere in woman’s name. She had promise. She had courage.”

That’s the book I expected The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith to be: Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith’s life story, with Mary Ellen herself placed, rightly, at its center. And that is what we get, sort of, in part. Usually what is known about Mary Ellen is what the figure Johnson calls “the Biographer” has said about her in passing, while telling the story of her famous second husband. “But of course,” as Johnson says,

Mary Ellen, when she married George Meredith, had had a past already. Had already fallen in love, had already been married, had given birth to a child—all those life experiences that we normally expect to take place after the close of a Victorian novel, had taken place for Mary Ellen before the story with George began. The real drama of her life may have seemed to her to have nothing to do with George Meredith at all.

Every bit of information Johnson could scrounge up about Mary Ellen (including from a cache of letters she came across fortuitously in a box under a bed in a small house in Purley, Surrey) has gone into her recreation of that “real drama.” There is a lot of it! Mary Ellen’s father, the Romantic writer Thomas Love Peacock (he was a close friend of Shelley) thought girls should be free-spirited and educated and brought her up accordingly (he was in effect a single parent, as Mary Ellen’s mother “suffered from one of those long, household forms of madness, or severe neurosis, to which ladies in those days seemed especially prone). Peacock’s approach sounds delightful, and delightfully progressive:

Mary Ellen learned to read; she was allowed to read widely, pretty much what she wanted . . . unlike John Stuart [Mill], Mary Ellen was given fiction and poetry, to develop the heart as well as the head. And Mary Ellen messed around in boats, like a boy, and learned to row and sail and swim. She grew up to be a fearless horsewoman, so she was probably given a pony early.

And yet, Johnson considers, or imagines Mary Ellen’s contemporaries considering, her upbringing may have taught her to want things and to behave in ways incompatible with ordinary expectations for nice young ladies of the time. Johnson gives a brisk and basically sound overview of 19th-century gender roles and conventions, familiar to anyone who has read around in or about the history and literature of the period; she also rightly notes that the “ideal” woman (“innocent, unlearned, motherly”) was always a fiction, “encountered more often in the breach than in the observance,” although her image exerted powerful influence over how real women’s behavior was judged, as Mary Ellen’s history (meaning not her life, but the way that life would be told) was to show. Peacock’s good intentions may, ironically, have set Mary Ellen up for failure: “perhaps Mary Ellen Peacock would have been better off if she had not been so clever and educated.”

The first “real drama” of Mary Ellen’s life was her first marriage, to a dashing sailor; he drowned, tragically, very soon after the wedding, but not too soon for Mary Ellen to have conceived a child. Then she met and married the aspiring novelist George Meredith, who was a few years her junior: apparently he always said she was 9 years older, but it was actually 6.5; he also called her “mad,” but in Johnson’s telling anyway, there is no supporting evidence for that claim. Things went well for the couple at first: they had literary ambition in common and eventually mutual projects, as well as children, but their happiness did not last. “The Historian cannot capture a process so slow as the death of a marriage,” Johnson (whose most famous novel today is called, as it happens, Le Divorce) remarks pensively:

He would need some other medium than the pen to do it with—perhaps one of those cameras that photograph the growing of a plant and the unfolding of its blossoms. With such a camera we could see the expressions change, telescoping the imperceptible changes of seven years into a few moments. We watch the passionate adoring glances glaze to cordiality, grow expressionless, contract with pain. The once ardent glances are now averted; fingers disentwine and are folded behind the separate backs. Backs are turned.

There is a lot about how things then unfolded that Johnson (like her antagonist “the Biographer”) can’t know for sure. The crucial undisputed fact is that Mary  Ellen left Meredith, “eloping” with their mutual friend, the artist—and later ceramics collector—Henry Wallis. (Wallis’s most famous painting was and is ‘The Death of Chatterton,’ for which Meredith was the model.) They lived together adulterously and had a child; not long after, Mary Ellen died, leaving her still-doting father (and, presumably, her lover, but not her legal husband) bereft. Meredith continued to write novels; he also wrote a sonnet sequence, Modern Love, that chronicles the decay of a marriage much like his own. He achieved the lasting fame he always dreamed of and also made a second marriage with none of the turbulence of the first. Mary Ellen receded into obscurity, except, as Johnson emphasizes, through her pervasive presence in Meredith’s imagination and thus in his fiction.

So far so good, and it is good, though there is possibly something reductive or dated in Johnson’s antagonistic vision of the times and people she writes about. It is hard to engage with the otherness of the past, especially when its values offend one’s own cherished principles; I struggle with this too, in my own thinking and writing and teaching about women in the 19th century, and I caution my students about it, urging them (for one thing) to avoid the anachronistic dichotomies often prompted by our ideas of what is or isn’t “feminist.” Johnson’s book, too, is now a historical document; that it sounds so “seventies” to me is not its fault, and it is overall a good thing that to some extent we can now take for granted the importance of “lesser lives” of all kinds, without insisting on it quite so, well, insistently.

The surprising thing about The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith, for me, was how much else it does besides reconstitute Mary Ellen’s biography. One fascinating aspect is Johnson’s self-consciousness about her own methodology, something that becomes explicit through her extensive notes. These turn out to be only incidentally about citing sources. A lot of them amplify or illustrate parts of the main text (for example, in the notes you will find many of the recipes associated with the cookery books by Mary Ellen or her daughter by her first marriage, Edith Nicolls). But others take on complex questions about how to do the work Johnson has undertaken, and particularly about how to understand the relationship between conventional biographical sources and information and the insights that are offered by an author’s writings, specifically in this case by Meredith’s novels. This is, as Johnson is clearly aware, a vexed issue: she raises the specter of what critics call the “biographical fallacy,” which can lead to “facile connections” between the life and the art, but also of the biographical tendency to chronicle the work “without imagining that there was much connection between that work and the writer’s ongoing life experiences.” She advocates what she calls, citing Frederick Crews, “a sense of historical dynamics,” recognizing that though a one-to-one correspondence is an implausible assumption, still there inevitably relationships between writers’ lives and what they write.

She is also very interested in the reciprocal influence of genres on each other, especially of fictional conventions on the form of biographies, and of the impossibility in any case of simply recounting facts (even when there is abundant and unequivocal evidence of their outline, as there is not, for much of the story she is telling) without relying on qualities that are not strictly objective:

But what, anyway, are the ‘facts’ of a writer’s life? That George Meredith had an erring wife is a ‘fact,’ but for him, the existence of those fictional heroines Mrs. Mount and Mrs. Lovell is also ‘fact.’ The one is an external, the other an internal fact. The danger for the biographer, or critic, lies in mismatching external and interior equivalents. I suppose there is no safeguard against doing this except, one hopes, common sense and a (no doubt) suspect degree of empathy, especially with the ‘seamy’ side of human nature . . . Which returns me to my point: the biographer must be a historian, but also a novelist and a snoop.

At many points in The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith Johnson the novelist is clearly at work: she has to guess, imagine, speculate, embroider in order to fill in what we otherwise wouldn’t know. Does that mean that her biography (if that’s what it is) of Mary  Ellen is not “true,” as the title proclaims it to be? Yes and no, I think she would readily say: it is as true as possible, factually, and where it cannot be true in that way, it is true to what her empathy reveals, or truthful about its status as empathetic guesswork.

The other aspect of The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith that I didn’t expect but really appreciated is pointed to by its subtitle, and Other Lesser Lives. More than just a memoir of Mary Ellen, Johnson’s book is a meditation on the whole concept of a “lesser life.” There is a polemical side to this, as I’ve already noted, a feminist advocacy for equalizing our attention, not looking only at, or caring only about, the great men of history:

Of course there is no way to really know the minds of Lizzie Rossetti, or the first Mrs. Milton, or all those silent Dickens children suffering the  mad unkindness, the delirious pleasures of their terrifying father’s company . . . But we know a lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one.

I actually found more powerful, though (perhaps, again, because this particular polemic has lost some of its urgency, though certainly not all of it), the sections of The True History that remind us that, from the right perspective, all lives are lesser. At these times Johnson’s book is less a literary history or biography and more a quirky form of momento mori, its attention to the leveling effects of death and time serving to puncture even the most inflated vanity even as it offers (perhaps) some philosophical consolation. “Whether Felix grew up to be like his Mama, or his Grandpapa, or his Papa,” she observes, in a passage characteristic of the book’s engaging yet disorienting blend of briskness and gravitas,

it is impossible to say. An old solicitor at the firm that always took care of Henry’s business remembers that he was a ‘tall thin man who always appeared to wear a long black cloak.’ Just before his twentieth birthday he entered the Bank of England and there worked with distinction, whatever working with distinction in a bank may involve [ha!], as Manager of the Dividend Department, for more than forty years and received a table service when he retired. He was happier than Papa, or Arthur [Mary Ellen’s son by George Meredith], or so it may be hoped, in that he married a pretty girl named Alice and had two children. Now they are all dead.

That’s an unexpected mic drop moment, there! It doesn’t mean (I feel certain) to suggest that none of what she’s just told us, or none of what these people did or were liked, matters, but it does abruptly remind us that in fact, all life stories end the same way. The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith ends on a similar note, more poignantly but still with a touch of the wit that makes the book such enjoyable reading:

Painters, writers, potters—all are dead. The greater lives along with the lesser. Things remain. Mary Ellen’s pink parasol lies in a trunk in a parlor in Purley [where Johnson found Mary Ellen’s letters]. Henry’s drawings lie in the boxroom upstairs. Henry’s little painting of George as Chatterton hangs in the Tate Gallery, properly humidified. The hair from Shelley’s head that Peacock gave to Henry, hair from the sacred hair of Shelley, Henry had put into a little ring, and people always kept it safe, but thieves broke into the house in Purley a year or two ago and stole it, and who can say where it is now? The turquoise vase from Rakka is safe in the museum; but I don’t know what happened to the majolica platter.

I recommended this book for my book club as a “feminist palate cleanser” after Money. (I was also inspired by the great discussion of it on Backlisted, which now I will listen to again.) It is that, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much more it is. I hope the others enjoy it as much as I did.

Now the pressing question is: do I want to read any of Meredith’s novels? or maybe Modern Love, which I read at least some of as a graduate student but haven’t looked at since? Before I read Johnson’s book, all that the name “George Meredith” readily brought to mind is Wilde’s famous quip “Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning.” I love Browning, so maybe that’s a good omen? The Egoist seems to be generally considered Meredith’s best novel, but Johnson’s comments about Diana of the Crossways make it sound like the one I’d most like to try. Any Meredith lovers, or at least readers, out there who’d like to weigh in?