Sir Willoughby Patterne is handsome, rich, generous and admired, and the novel is the slow, exact demonstration of what it is like to be engaged to him. Meredith's style won him more admirers among writers than readers - he worked for years as a publisher's reader - and here the difficulty pays: nobody has ever anatomised male vanity so completely, and Clara Middleton's attempts to get free are as tense as any thriller.

George Meredith (1828-1909) was an English novelist and poet. He worked as a reader for the publisher Chapman & Hall and served as a war correspondent for the Morning Post during the Austro-Prussian War. His novels include The Egoist, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, and Diana of the Crossways.