Sandra Belloni by George Meredith (1864)

The dominating comic notion of this novel is Finer Shades and Nice Feelings, which add up in Meredith's mind to something called Sentiment. This is not sentimentality in the modern sense. It is rather an idea along the lines of what might be called 'received fancy' or 'cultivated emotion'. That this concept has no clear definition is indicative. It is not only the comedy in this piece which is riddled through with febrile searchings. A simplified summary might be: 'Complex People involved in a Complex Plot written about in a Complex Manner'. Meredith's many characters here are full of misguidance or secrecy or self-deception or double-mindedness. The plot revolves all of these (and there are a lot of directions of impulse, like a forest of arrows in multitudinous tangents) in a tempest of storylines. Of course, though, the big thing about Meredith is his style. So this melee of attributes and angles is presented on the page with no facile attention paid to clarity. One sees for example what might be a crucial matter at one remove, or behind a veil, hinted at by a couple of things someone else says, or only explicable once something else has been said (or uncovered) a chapter later. Other elements are even less clear - the reader is still not quite sure, even after the event is done and dusted. But Meredith is nothing if not fascinating; the decoding challenge is one I relish. Ostensibly, this book concerns the trials of Emilia (nickname Sandra) Belloni, as she is taken up by an upwardly mobile Surrey family. She is an Italian, and has the beginnings of a fine singing voice. The comedy is mainly housed with this family, the Poles, as they skirmish socially with a rival family, take on lovers, angle for good marriages, put up with socially awkward incomers with varying degrees of patience and puffed-upness. Around them is a set comprised mainly of the well-to-do whose lives they aim to emulate. When a Greek associate wants to take Emilia to Italy to study for a life in opera, a subtle series of events begin rolling, in which politics, the swings of fortune, love and love's shadow, revenge and Sentiment all play a part. If there is one major criticism that can be directed at this book it is the insubstantiality of its eponymous heroine. Emilia is a strange vacancy in many ways, almost a cipher, but of course a Meredithian one: a cipher saddled with endless mysterious implications.