The House on the Beach: A Realistic Tale is a novella by English novelist George Meredith. It first appeared in print in 1877.
A young woman is forced by conscience to become inappropriately engaged to a far older man, who threatens to reveal the secret that her father was previously a deserter.
Although the novella wasn't written until the late 1870s, Meredith had started the story 15 years prior in Seaford. [1] He appears to have been inspired to take up the story again after the 1876 Great Flood at Seaford, which forms the novella's dramatic denouement. [2]
The House on the Beach was first published in New Quarterly magazine in January 1877, [1] a magazine in which Meredith also published The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper and The Tale of Chloe , novellas often classified and published with The House on the Beach.
In assessing Meredith's approach to the comedic, the character of Tinman dressing himself in his court dress for his own admiration is an example of "when the control of reason is removed". [1]
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This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1877.
George Meredith was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. At first his focus was poetry, influenced by John Keats among others, but he gradually established a reputation as a novelist. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) briefly scandalised Victorian literary circles. Of his later novels, the most enduring is The Egoist (1879), though in his lifetime his greatest success was Diana of the Crossways (1885). His novels were innovative in their attention to characters' psychology, and also took a close interest in social change. His style, in both poetry and prose, was noted for its syntactic complexity; Oscar Wilde likened it to "chaos illumined by brilliant flashes of lightning". He was an encourager of other novelists, as well as an influence on them; among those to benefit were Robert Louis Stevenson and George Gissing. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times.
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