Sister, Sister

Since Diane Johnson’s The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith And Other Lesser Lives (1972), which excavated the life of the poet George Meredith’s wife, Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith, among others, there has been a small but vibrant market for biographies of figures previously relegated to the margins of other people’s lives. Johnson’s book was a feminist intervention that aimed to reanimate the life of a forgotten woman, making inventive use of the minimal available sources. Yet her eye also lingered on many small characters in the periphery of Peacock Meredith’s life, taking the opportunity to discuss overlooked figures more broadly. In this way, The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith was part of a wave of social history and cultural studies scholarship of the 1970s onwards dedicated to ordinary people who didn’t leave behind a formal archive.