It’s the birthday of Victorian author George Meredith (1828-1909), known for some brilliant works no one reads anymore, such as The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and The Egoist (1879), for helping pioneer the psychological novel, and for creating strong female characters treated by their author as true equals.

Meredith was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, into a family of tailors with a supposed ancestry going back to Welsh kings, so there was always a bit of dissonance between the sense of family pride and the reality of their social standing. Meredith inherited a bit from his mother, who died when he was five, and later a bit from an aunt, and these small inheritances helped with his education. In 1842, he entered the Moravian School at Neuwied on the Rhine and was actually not miserable, in fact had a glowingly positive experience. (To review: this was not a British boarding school.) His two years there were marked by interesting activities and expeditions, an atmosphere of thoughtfulness and respect, and a complete lack of bullying.

At 18, Meredith was apprenticed to a lawyer but evidently found this career path too boring for words. (Honestly, I almost fell asleep just writing that sentence.) So he worked at being a poet. His self-published collection Poems (1851) won high praise from Big Important People (Charles Kingsley, Alfred Tennyson) but, shockingly, made him no money. By now he was married to Mary Ellen Nicolls, widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock; they had a son, Arthur, but the marriage went about as well as Meredith’s poetry sales. Meredith wrote a lighthearted fantasy novel, The Shaving of Shagpat: An Arabian Entertainment (1855), that garnered praise from George Eliot but confused readers. His wife then ran off with an artist type and Meredith wrote Richard Feverel, which is, interestingly, about a man whose wife abandons him and his son. It’s also got a big dose of class systems and atheism and some extramarital sex, which led to libraries banning it, which led to the book doing poorly. Meredith continued to write more novels and poetry anyway and in 1864 he married again, more happily this time. They had a son and a daughter and ultimately settled in Surrey.

Meredith by now was reading manuscripts for a publisher to make money, while he continued his own writing. Further notable works include Beauchamp’s Career (1875), The Egoist, and Diana of the Crossways (1885). By his death, Meredith had finally achieved great fame and respect as a man of letters, but his works went out of fashion and never made a strong comeback outside of academic circles, perhaps due to his highly idiosyncratic, inaccessible, dialogue-heavy, action-bereft style. (Tell you what: read a Meredith novel, and I’ll send you $5. Maybe. I’d need some proof though.)

Have a highly accessible sort of Tuesday in spite of poor road conditions and stay scrupulously honest to the data.