The Ordeal of Richard Feverel — Volume 1
1888
Sir Austin Feverel has devoted his life to a single experiment: raising his son Richard according to 'The System,' a philosophy of sexual restraint he believes will produce a perfect man. But Richard is not a theoretical construct. He is flesh and blood, and when love arrives in his life, the carefully constructed walls of his father's ideology begin to crumble with devastating consequences. Meredith charts the collision between abstract theory and lived experience with precision that feels almost cruel in its understanding. This is a novel that dared to suggest Victorian morality itself might be the poison, not the cure. Its frank treatment of sexuality and jealousy shocked readers in 1859, and its psychological penetration still feels modern. The irony is sharp, the tragedy genuine, and the prose demands attention from anyone interested in the evolution of the English novel.
