The House on the Beach

A young woman is forced by conscience to become inappropriately engaged to a far older man, who threatens to reveal the secret that her father was previously a deserter.

Although the novella wasn't written until the late 1870s, Meredith had started the story 15 years prior in Seaford. He appears to have been inspired to take up the story again after the 1876 Great Flood at Seaford, which forms the novella's dramatic denouement.{{Cite book|title=GEORGE MEREDITH : his life and friends in relation to his work (classic reprint)|author=ELLIS, S. M.|date=2015|publisher=FORGOTTEN Books|isbn=978-1331477228|oclc=978399330}}

The House on the Beach was first published in New Quarterly magazine in January 1877,{{cite journal|last=Beer|first=Gillian|title=Meredith's idea of Comedy: 1876-1880|journal=Nineteenth-Century Fiction|date=September 1965|volume=20|issue=2|pages=165–176|doi=10.2307/2932544 |jstor=2932544}} a magazine in which Meredith also published The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper and The Tale of Chloe, novellas often classified and published with The House on the Beach.

In assessing Meredith's approach to the comedic, the character of Tinman dressing himself in his court dress for his own admiration is an example of "when the control of reason is removed".

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{{George Meredith}}

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Category:Novels by George Meredith

Category:1877 British novels

Category:British novellas

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