‘Turbid pictures’: George Meredith's Modern Love

George Meredith’s Modern Love is a sequence of fifty ‘sonnets’ (sixteen-line poems of four quatrains) about a disintegrating marriage. The husband and wife are intensely unhappy, able neither to live with nor without each other. At the beginning of the sequence the wife, often referred to as ‘Madam’ or ‘the woman’, is involved with another man. Later the husband becomes involved with another woman, referred to as ‘the Lady’. Most of the sonnets are organized around a particular scene representing a moment of emotional crisis, revelation, or selfrecognition. There are two main kinds of scene. The first of these is private and domestic, in which anger, bitterness, pain, and jealousy are often mixed with sorrow, pity, even tenderness in a Lawrentian flux of conflicting emotions. The other is concerned with the public face of married life in which husband and wife maintain the appearance of a harmonious marriage in bitterly ironic situations. The wife is tortured by her new passion and the husband finds little consolation in his Lady. They are drawn back together in their unhappiness, but bitterness and jealousy are too strong for the attempted reconciliation. Their marriage is dead. In despair the wife kills herself, the husband at her bedside when she dies.