How did Modern Love draw on George Meredith’s experience of a troubled marriage?

George Meredith’s poem Modern Love (1862) is a semi-autobiographical work that served as a creative outlet to process his own disastrous marriage. The poem draws directly on the emotional turmoil and eventual collapse of his relationship with his first wife, Mary Ellen Nicolls.12

The marriage was marked by poverty, disappointment, and intense antagonism between two highly strung, critical personalities. The situation reached a breaking point in 1857 when his wife left for Wales with an artist friend of the couple, Henry Wallis, and later gave birth to a child whose paternity Meredith denied. By the time he wrote Modern Love, Meredith had gained enough distance from these events to approach the subject of marital infidelity and its consequences with compassion. Much like his novel Evan Harrington helped him move past the "tailor demon" of his family background, Modern Love functioned as a means to exorcise the pain of his failed marriage.1