Meredith was from a working-class background which he later tried to hide. He was educated rather sporadically in England and at a Moravian school in Germany, and did not attend university. He worked as a reader for the publishers Chapman and Hall, in which capacity he rejected such authors as George Bernard Shaw and manuscripts such as Ellen Wood's East Lynne, one of the best-selling novels of the Victorian period. He married young and in 1857 his wife, the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, left him for a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. After her death in 1861 he remarried.
Meredith began publishing in 1851 with a volume of poetry. His early writings did poorly, but by the turn of the decade his fiction was receiving positive reviews and by the fin de siècle he was considered one of the greatest living English authors.
Modern Love takes the poetic sequence, so often used like Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese to express passionate desire for a beloved or to chart a romantic relationship, in new directions as it dissects the disintegrating relationship between a man and his wife. Like Meredith's fiction, it presents a sympathetic but ultimately ambiguous view of the confining situation of marriage for intelligent women, as well as being a poignant reflection on the complex changes taking place in relationships between middle-class men and women in Victorian society.
From Modern Love (written 1861-2, published 1862)