Evan Harrington — Volume 6

Evan Harrington has spent his life performing a gentleman for his grandfather's sake, but the performance is crumbling. The grandson of a tradesman who bought his way into gentility, Evan finds himself at the novel's end torn between the woman he loves and the social architecture his family has built. George Meredith's first major novel is a barbed comedy of manners that dissects the English obsession with class with surgical precision. Rose, the woman who sees through Evan's pretensions, represents something dangerous: authenticity in a world of performances. Volume six brings the novel to its conclusion, where the question is no longer whether Evan can maintain the fiction, but who he will be when it finally falls away. Meredith writes with a wit that cuts and a psychological acuity that anticipates the modern novel, making this a portrait of a particular social moment that still resonates with anyone who has ever performed a version of themselves for someone else's approval.