The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

George Meredith (Author), Edward Mendelson (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Classics | Publication Date: June 1, 1999

"Of all nineteenth-century English novels, " claims Edward Mendelson in his Introduction to this edition, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is the most self-consciously literary in its style and structure and the most sexually explicit in its plot and theme." First published in 1859, Meredith's first and most controversial novel concerns Sir Austin Feverel's misconceived attempts to educate his son Richard according to a system of his own devising -- a system based on theories of sexual restraint. Exploring generational and gender conflicts, the psychology of sexual jealousy and repression, and myths of Eden and Utopia, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel shocked Victorian readers but gained for itself a cult following. "Now that it has been freed from its reputation, " writes Mendelson, "readers can discover again the tragic and ironic force, and the psychological and formal complexity that make The Ordeal of Richard Feverel one of the most profound, subtle, and moving works of English fiction."

Editorial Reviews

Review

Third novel by George Meredith, published in 1859. It is typical of his best work, full of allusion and metaphor, lyrical prose and witty dialogue, with a deep exploration of the psychology of motive and rationalization. The novel's subject is the relationship between a cruelly manipulative father and a son who loves a girl of a lower social class. Both men are self-deluded and proud, and the story's ending is tragic. When it was first published, some readers considered the novel prurient and, as a result, it was banned by the leading lending libraries. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140434836
• ISBN-13: 978-0140434835
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,913,931 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Meredith's Bildungsroman, August 5, 2005

By 

Sherringford Clark (Mayor's Income, Tennessee) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

George Meredith is best known for his poetry and his later novel _The Egoist_, and these are indeed the best places to begin with Meredith's oeuvre. _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ is not nearly as lapidary in style or as acute in psychology as _The Egoist_. The latter work also illustrates Meredith's famed comic theory, though this is somehat in evidence in _The Ordeal_.
In the final analysis, Meredith's own judgment of _The Ordeal_ is the correct one: it is novel whose dullness proves fatal. Moreover, though _The Ordeal_ displays a sophisticated morality, Meredith's Bildungsroman is greatly inferior to Goethe's model _Wilhelm Meister_. Meredith is neither as perspicacious a psychologist nor as great a stylist as Goethe.
Nonetheless, _The Ordeal_ is a successful dramatic work and provides a wonderful addition to the British Bildungsroman. Furthermore,_The Ordeal_ is a very modern novel, featuring a number of unstable narrative voices, a pervasive intertextuality, and a subtle ironic spirit. Though Meredith's prose, like his poetry, is often overly precious, _The Ordeal_ proves him an incisive writer, leagues above many of his contemporaries, e.g. Thomas Hardy. Indeed, _The Ordeal_, along with _The Egoist_, provides a direct link between the Victorian and the modern novel, and thus, while hardly a masterpiece, it is well worth the time for any reader interested in the development of the English novel.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Funny, Wise, and Brilliantly Written, November 17, 2005

By 

amorteur (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

I started reading George Meredith in an English class at Hunter College, where a brilliant professor assigned us *The Egoist.* Although not as great as that novel, The Ordeal is quite rewarding on its own terms. The story begins with the tale of a comically embittered misogynist who responds to his wife's adulterous romance (with poet and best friend "Diaper Sandoe") by rejecting women *en toto* and deciding to raise his son Richard in isolation from society. Well, "we shall see how the experiment turned out." Richard, needless to say, reaches the age of 15 and discovers that contra his father, girls have their charms. Things go from there. The book is filled with funny, quirky and brilliant characters rendered in delightfully elaborate prose. It isn't, contrary to one reviewer's remark, Dickensian at all; for unlike Dickens, Meredith has something to say. He is not so much periphrastic as he is precise. I found The Ordeal quite funny -- I've read it three times -- as well as heartbreaking and wise. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys Victorian fiction. I would start here and then go on to *The Egoist*, possibly the wittiest novel ever written.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Ordeal: Eden Revisited, August 27, 2006

By 

Martin Asiner (jersey city, nj United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL is a novel that suffers from the author's inability to decide whether he wished to write a comedy that had tragic overtones or a tragedy with comic undertones. The result is neither a literary fish nor a polemical fowl. George Meredith was just starting a long career when he wrote this book, in which he later made numerous changes, omitting many unneeded characters, the result of which was to create a slightly more coherent work.

Part of the problem with the reader's blending into the book was the scattershot sprinkling of religious allegory that Meredith uses to emphasize his theme that man was born innocent but corrupted by scheming women. Meredith mentions more than a few times the word "apple" in an Edenic context, a symbolism which tends to flatten his characters into updated biblical figures. In real life George Meredith was hurt by an uncaring father who probably was the model for Sir Austen Feverel, who decided to recreate the biblical confrontation between Adam, Eve, and the snake. Only this time Sir Austen would eliminate the snake and give Adam advance knowledge of Eve's duplicity. Adam is Sir Austen's son, Richard, who from birth is taught to accept the teachings of a new system which emphasizes the growth of positive personal attributes on one hand and a watchful caution of womanly wiles on the other. Richard, then, is groomed to be a successful sociological Petri dish in which Richard avoids the apple bite that ensnared Adam. The problem, of course, is that a man is not a dish, and for the entire experiment to succeed in the sense that Richard would grow up as his father wished, then Sir Austen would have to have the same divine foresight that God has. All he has is a wish to prevent his son from suffering as he himself suffered at the hands of an unscrupulous woman, but this desire is not enough to shape Richard's growth into a healthy direction. Predictably, Richard drifts in and out of trouble, sometimes aided by his father's money, and other times by the timely intervention of trusted companions. Later, when Richard falls in love, he is not equipped by nature or training to withstand the womanly wiles of a lady whose hired job is to do just that. Thus Sir Austen's grand design has a cracked flaw that results in tragedy for Richard and his beloved. THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL, in its unwieldy mixture of romance, tragedy, drama, and bible lore run amuck, becomes more of an ordeal for the reader than for Richard.