The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: the Shaping Experience

Abstract

The Ordeal is the story of Meredith the artist as a man of ordeal. While writing it, Meredith himself was undergoing the experience of desertion by his first wife, Mary Ellen Nicholls, who had eloped with the painter Henry Wallis late in 1858, and left Meredith with their five year old son, Arthur. The situation is described by Lionel Stevenson in his biography of Meredith: ‘Their elopement marked the end of a year of torment for Meredith. First the gradual conviction that his wife loved someone else, then the grim farce of keeping up a public appearance of amity between them, next the shame and bitterness of the decision over the baby’s paternity [the son born to Mary on 18 April], and finally the open disgrace of her flight—all these combined to inflict upon him an incalculable shock.’¹