About This Book
The unfinished comedy is set in a Surrey garden and stages a satiric contest of courtship and sentiment among relatives, suitors, and talkative friends. A pontificating professor advances a theory of the devoted widow while an exacting uncle polices his niece Astraea's enforced sanctity and admirers like Arden press their suit. Comic figures—a teasing wife, sympathetic companions, and gossiping ladies—reveal tensions between public oratory and private desire, teasing out the contradictions of fashionable sentimentalities about marriage, widowhood, and moral display through witty scenes and argumentative exchanges.
About the Author
More Books by This Author
6 picks
A Reading of Life, with Other Poems
by George Meredith
An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit
by George Meredith
Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life
by George Meredith
Beauchamp's Career — Complete
by George Meredith
Beauchamp's Career — Volume 1
by George Meredith
Beauchamp's Career — Volume 2
by George Meredith
You May Also Like
6 picks
"A Most Unholy Trade," Being Letters on the Drama by Henry James
by Henry James
"Der Tag"; or, The Tragic Man
by J. M. Barrie
"I'll Leave It To You": A Light Comedy In Three Acts
by Noël Coward
"Kukka kultain kuusistossa": Komedia yhdessä näytöksessä
by Aleksanteri Rahkonen
"Muru": Huvinäytelmä yhdessä näytöksessä
by Karl August Tavaststjerna
"Old Scrooge": A Christmas Carol in Five Staves. / Dramatized from Charles Dickens' Celebrated Christmas Story.
by Charles Augustus Scott