New Correspondence of Mary Ellen Meredith

Mary Ellen Meredith's life has always been overshadowed by the fame of her father, Thomas Love Peacock, and of her second husband, George Meredith. Yet her continuing obscurity is due less to biographical neglect than to a more fundamental lack of documentary evidence. George Meredith's biographers have never doubted his first wife's profound impact on his life and literary career, but they have never had enough correspondence, or enough contemporary records of any kind, to provide a satisfactory account of her character and motives. Peacock and Meredith were both extraordinarily sensitive to publicity, and both went to great lengths to protect their privacy and to limit public exposure of Mary Ellen's sexual transgression. Hence, much of what has been written about her merely repeats the gossip of friends, acquaintances, and even strangers—a good deal of it stemming from Meredith's own conversation in his later years and reflecting his lifelong bitterness over the failure of his first marriage and his wife's affair with the painter Henry Wallis.

During his lifetime, Meredith succeeded in withholding even the most basic facts of his family origin and early life from public knowledge, concealing them behind what his cousin and biographer S. M. Ellis called "an impenetrable veil of reticence."¹ After Meredith's death, his son William Maxse Meredith, in his edition of Letters of George Meredith, gave a few details of his father's first marriage but dismissed the "catastrophe" in a vague paragraph.² Ellis only partially lifted the veil, portraying Mary Ellen's fate as that of a stereotypical "erring wife," abandoned by her lover, wandering restlessly from place to place, and dying alone, consumed by remorse and constantly in tears.³ In the absence of documentary sources, Ellis's mixture of fact, fiction, and conjecture remained largely unquestioned for half a century. Even in the early 1950s, when Lionel Stevenson wrote what has since been regarded as the nearest thing to a standard life of George Meredith,⁴ none of Mary Ellen's own letters was known to scholars, and her published correspondence was limited to seven letters from members of the Shelley circle—one from Peacock, four from Mary Shelley, and two from Thomas Jefferson Hogg.⁵ Ironically, it was only after a precipitous decline in Meredith's literary reputation that substantial quantities of new manuscript material began to surface. C. L. Cline made a modest start by including four of Mary Ellen's letters in his full-scale edition of Meredith's Letters.⁶ But Diane Johnson was the first biographer to seek out Mary Ellen's manuscript remains, and her account, The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, was the first attempt to tell Mary Ellen's story from her own perspective.⁷ By gaining access to the previously unexamined papers of Henry Wallis, as well as to Mary Ellen's commonplace book and a few family letters, Johnson was able to demolish a number of biographical myths and to replace them with a more realistic account of Mary Ellen's character and situation.

Since the publication of Lesser Lives in 1972, previously unknown letters and manuscripts have thrown new light on Mary Ellen's relations with Peacock and the rest of her family,⁸ with Mary Shelley,⁹ and with Hogg;¹⁰ on her bitter quarrels with Meredith in the early years of their marriage;¹¹ on her friendship with John William Parker Junior and her contributions to Fraser's Magazine;¹² on her projected revision of William Kitchiner's The Cook's Oracle for John W. Parker & Son;¹³ on her relationship with Charles Blachford Mansfield and her attempt to establish a school for female domestic servants in London;¹⁴ on her efforts to support Meredith's candidacy for the Assistant Secretaryship of the Society of Arts;¹⁵ and on her separation from Meredith and her affair with Henry Wallis.¹⁶ Perhaps most important of all, Anne Ramsden Bennett's manuscript memoir entitled "My Recollections of M^rs G. Meredith" has provided the only substantial account of Mary...