Finding Lost Voices: The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith

A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.

Aug 18, 2024

“We have stopped, or we have pretended to stop, the flow of time, and all the lesser lives with which we are here concerned are collected for the introduction.”

So begins one of my favorite biographies of all time. I love it because its author, Diane Johnson, broke the form of biography to tell the story of a woman who had been forgotten or whose life had been overshadowed by the life of her famous husband, the Victorian writer George Meredith. The life of Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls Meredith (1821-1861).

*The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives.*

During the summer session at UC Davis, I’m teaching a class called Biography as a Revolution. In it, students learn the art of writing the mini-biography by reading experts like Fleur Jaeggy. We spend a week or two discussing the art of biography and the flaws of biography. Then, they choose their subject. I ask them to choose someone who they think has been misremembered or forgotten. And, of course, they are blowing my mind within days with their subject choices and willingness to break the rules to tell stories that can’t be seen in our regular view of history. I learned much about what I teach to my class by reading Diane Johnson’s revolutionary biography: The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives.

Diane Johnson (b. 1934) grew up in Illinois. During her sophomore year of college, she won the Mademoiselle magazine Guest Editor contest along with Sylvia Plath and spent a month living in New York City working on the magazine. In an article she wrote for Vogue magazine in 2003, she reflected on what she learned during that month in New York: "I realized that if you took pains with your writing, you could make art and that the rather facile little stories I had dashed off for my English classes or the school magazine were probably not art. It was, in fact, the example of "Sunday at the Mintons'," Sylvia Plath's winning story in the Guest Editor contest, that made that point to me and changed my life, though not immediately."

After her month in New York, Johnson took a detour from her writing career whne she married her first husband, B. Lamar Johnson Jr., and had four children. As a busy mother of young children, Johnson had to learn how to write in the spare moments she could find available—a method that would prove productive. Johnson would publish in multiple genres. She published her first novel, Fair Game in 1965 and continued to publish both fiction and nonfiction regularly. Her work has received many awards. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Persian Nights in 1988, a National Book Award finalist, and the winner of the California Book Award for "Le Divorce." In 1980, she adapted Stephen King’s novel and wrote the screenplay for The Shining with its director, Stanley Kubrick.

Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls Meredith (1821-1861)

But it was in 1970, when Johnson found Mary Ellen Meredith’s letters to her lover Henry Wallis that she became inspired to write her first biography. She found them “hidden in a paint box under a bed at Vera and Cliff Whiting’s house in Purley, Surrey.” For the previous two years, Johnson had been traveling to England, “looking for traces of Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls Meredith,” George Meredith’s first wife, with little luck because while Meredith wrote one of his best novels, Diana of the Crossways, about his wife, all of his biographers dismissed her and rarely included anything about her except the facts that she was Meredith’s adulterous wife who died young. This exclusion of any facts about Mary Ellen Meredith’s life made it nearly impossible for Johnson to find information about her. But, as luck would have it, when Mary Ellen Meredith left her husband, she exchanged letters with her lover, Henry Wallis. He saved letters, and then his heirs saved them until, over a century later, Diane Johnson found them in the Whitings’ home. The letters led Johnson to write a biography that brought back the voice of Mary Ellen Meredith.

Mary Ellen Meredith was born in London in 1821. Her father was the writer Thomas Love Peacock, who believed in educating his daughter. Mary Ellen was celebrated as a smart, high-spirited, educated woman from a young age. A gift that, when she got older and left home, backfired in many ways, for the world in which she lived was quite different from the world in which she was raised. No one expected her to be smart and passionate. And the women she was surrounded by had not been given the same upbringing and education so she found them uninspiring. When she left home, she really had only two possibilities as a woman: she could either become a governess or get married, so she chose the latter and married a sexy Marine named Edward Nicholls in 1844. They had a passionate marriage, which sadly ended two months later when Edward drowned while trying to save another man. Mary Ellen was not only heartbroken; she was pregnant, and as Vivian Gornick wrote in her introduction to Johnson’s biography when she “came home to her father, [she was] a twenty-three-year-old pregnant widow.”

Four years later, when Mary Ellen was twenty-seven and George Meredith was twenty, they met, fell in love, and were married. After eight stormy years of poverty where Mary Ellen was stuck at home in the traditional gender role of mother and housekeeper and George Meredith went out into the world whenever his heart desired, Mary Ellen felt deeply oppressed and chose to leave the marriage. While away, she had an affair. Yet, while most of the stories about Mary Ellen’s life ends there, Johnson’s biography was just getting started. Throughout, she adds culturally important details. Like for instance, the sheer amount of clothing that prevented Mary Ellen from acting on sexual impulse when she first met Henry Wallis, “at all times that the women we are concerned with conducted their lives…while entirely encased beneath their gowns in …a chemise, a corset, a camisole over the corset, up to six petticoats,…a vest or undershirt, stockings, garters, and depending on the decade, a whalebone crinoline or bustle…Whatever we are able to make of Mary Ellen’s adulterous behavior, we will not be able to excuse it on the grounds of impulse.”

Mary Ellen did not remain with her lover nor return to George Meredith. She left, pregnant, then fell ill with kidney disease. Three years later, she died alone. Almost no one attended her funeral. In the Victorian version of the story of Mary Ellen’s life, as Johnson reminds us, one would have thought she got what was coming to her. She had committed adultery and, therefore, could not have expected anything better than to have died alone. But, Johnson lets her reader see otherwise.

George Meredith remained haunted by his first wife. He wrote his fifty-sonnet poem, Modern Love, about their marriage in 1862, a year after Mary Ellen’s death. Below is the first sonnet from Modern Love: