Modern Love

Modern Love by George Meredith is a sequence of fifty 16-line sonnets about the failure of a marriage, an episodic verse narrative that has been described as "a novella in verse". Earlier working titles for the sequence were "The Love-Match" and then "The Tragedy of Modern Love". It first appeared in 1862 as part of the volume Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, published by Chapman & Hall, and then thirty years later, with slight modifications, from Macmillan. Context Modern Love reflects in part Meredith's own disillusionment after his wife Mary Ellen, the widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, left him for the painter Henry Wallis and had a child by him. The poem was not written until after her death in 1861, however, and cannot be regarded as autobiographical. Though it may depend emotionally on past feelings, details in the story-line differ in many respects from the biographical experience of both Meredith and his wife. In the poem the couple realise that their marriage is not working but jointly make a social pretence that suggests otherwise. Afterwards, and separately, they become sexually involved outside the marriage but eventually come together again. When this effort to repair the relationship fails, the wife poisons herself. Meredith described his work to a correspondent as "a dissection of the sentimental passion of these days". It appeared in the context of other large-scale Victorian depictions of contemporary relationships, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856) and Coventry Patmore'''s The Angel in the House (1854/1862). In his 1891 bibliographical reprint of Meredith's poem, however, what seemed significant to Thomas Bird Mosher was that it had followed shortly after mediaevalising works like William Morris's The Defence of Guinevere (1858), Algernon Charles Swinburne's verse dramas The Queen-Mother and Rosamond (1860) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translations of The Early Italian Poets (1861). But Meredith seems to occupy a middle ground, for while his story of the failing marriage is set in the present day, his poetic form, his frequent archaisms, the ironical address with which he ends sonnet 30 – "Lady, this is my Sonnet to your eyes" – all call to mind the Elizabethan amatory sequence.