George Meredith came to be seen as the last of the Victorian sages, something that did his reputation more harm than good in the long run. Yet his stance was anything but sage-like. He was an ebullient figure, hugely inventive and brimming with humour: ‘chaff you he would’, remembered one young family friend, ‘in prose, in verse, in parables, in grotesque images, the whole wafted along by gales of laughter’. Far from being moral diatribes, his works were intended to stimulate and provoke. They still do both. Largely through the operation of the comic principle, they challenge us to take the measure of ourselves, and find our true place in an ever-changing universe.

The best known of these works are his probing and innovative sonnet sequence ‘Modern Love’, and his virtuoso comic novel, The Egoist, along with the Essay on Comedy that preceded it. Also still admired and studied are his early Bildungsromans, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Adventures of Harry Richmond; his political novel, Beauchamp's Career; and Diana of the Crossways, inspired by the real-life struggles of Lady Caroline Norton to cope with the consequences of a failed marriage. Readers of these works are drawn into an unusual dialogue with the author – surely one of the age's most intriguing personalities – and repaid with a keen sense of lived experience. This not only sheds light on the Victorian period, but regularly surprises us into making fresh and, it seems, personal discoveries about human nature. Such moments of surprise are among the greatest rewards of reading Meredith.

The novels, with their unconventional plots and unforgettable characters, can be riveting. In the best-known episode in The Adventures of Harry Richmond, the young hero realizes that the mounted figure in the equestrian monument at Sarkeld in the Austrian Alps is actually his father. At the first flicker of life in the ‘statue’, the spectators gathered for the unveiling ceremony fall back ‘with amazed exclamations’. The hitherto unsuspecting reader is similarly checked. When the apparently bronze figure moves, speaks, and dismounts to embrace him, Harry is frozen: ‘I was unable to give out a breath’, he confesses (AHR 16; 197). The reader too is momentarily stunned.