"A Leaf from an Early Note Book ('Love in the Valley')"

A Leaf from an Early Note Book

George Meredith

Facsimile

This facsimile reproduction of stanzas from "Love in the Valley" is used as an illustration in Poems, Vol. II (Memorial Edition, Vol. XXV), facing p. 80. Meredith was an inveterate rewriter. For him, the writing process was fraught from beginning to end. [Commentary continues below.]

Scanned image and text by Jacqueline Banerjee.

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Meredith seems to express something of his own compulsion through one of his characters, the diarist Diana Warwick: "She wrote, she confessed, laboriously. The desire to prune, compress, over-charge, was a torment to the nervous woman writing under a sharp necessity for payment" (Diana of the Crossways 11). But he could expand as well as prune. "Love in the Valley," which appeared in his first volume of poetry, Poems (1851), was to grow considerably after its first publication. The first stanza shown here starts, "Comes a sudden question ["thought" has been struck through] should a strange hand pluck her —" (l. 41 in the first published version). The second stanza starts, "Shall the birds in vain...." (l.73 in the first published version). The final published version would be well over a hundred lines longer.

Sources

Meredith, George. Diana of the Crossways. Memorial Edition. Vol. XVI. New York, Scribner's, 1910. Internet Archive. Web. 5 May 2013.

_____. Poems, Vol. II. Memorial Edition, Vol. XXV. New York, Scribner's, 1910. Internet Archive. Web. 5 May 2013.

Last modified 15 December 2015