George Meredith's Early Verse: A New Manuscript in His First Wife's Hand

Near the end of his life, when his anonymous contributions to Household Words were identified from entries in the contributors' book, he even suggested privately that most of them were written by his first wife-a view that his son William Maxse Meredith later argued publicly.4 Since Mary Ellen was, in one way or another, the inspiration for much of his early work as a poet, it is interesting to find a manuscript in her hand containing transcripts of his early verse, including "The Three Maidens" and six untitled poems or fragments, several of them previously unpublished.