Now very much part of the literary establishment, Meredith had been advising Chapman & Hall for over ten years, and had ten books to his credit, including the 1862 volume of poetry containing ‘Modern Love’, and the two important Bildungsromans. The most recent of these had been serialized in the highly prestigious Cornhill Magazine. Yet not even Harry Richmond, embarked on as a ‘spanking bid for popularity’ (Letters I: 255), had found widespread favour. Readers not put off by his eccentricities of style and narration still found his plots hard to follow: ‘by no means easy reading, if we would understand what is going on, and keep up with the progress of events’, wrote A. J. Butler, reviewing Harry Richmond in the Athenaeum (CH, 155). This was not just a question of manner. He still lacked the ‘calm command of material’ he had once admired in Thackeray (Letters 1: 32). Fellow-writer Siegfried Sassoon later put this down to an ‘excess of creative excitability’ and he was probably right. Now Meredith would finally win over his critics with two wellstructured novels exploring, amongst much else, the nature of heroism – Beauchamp's Career, which was perhaps his own favourite, and The Egoist, for which he is now best known.

BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER

With a return to third-person narration, Meredith had no trouble making Nevil Beauchamp look the part of a hero, a protagonist imbued in his own right with natural dynamism: ‘His features, more than handsome to a woman, so mobile they were, shone of sea and spirit, the chance lights of the sea, and the spirit breathing out of it’ (BC 2; 22). An impetuous lad, a ‘hurricane of a youth’ (BC 10; 87), he is associated throughout with the sea in his vitality, and with fire in his fervour: he is first met trying to challenge a member (any member) of the French Guard to a duel, to defend his country's honour. This is the kind of quixotic ‘cloud-work’ in which Richard Feverel had indulged; but Meredith gives this latest hero the chance to display his ‘knightly manliness’ more usefully (BC 40; 458). Recent history is better assimilated here than in Vittoria: Nevil's uncle and guardian, the Hon.