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The Egoist
The Egoist
Nov 29, 2025 10:18 AM

Author:George Meredith,George Woodcock

The Egoist

Virginia Woolf said of The Egoist: 'Meredith pays us a supreme compliment to which as novel-readers we are little accustomed ... He imagines us capable of disinterested curiosity in the behaviour of our kind.' In this, the most dazzlingly intellectual of all his novels, Meredith tries to illuminate the pretensions of the most powerful class within the very citadel of security which its members have built. He develops to their logical extremity his ideas on egoism, on sentimentality and on the power of comedy. Meredith saw egoism as the great enemy of truth, feeling and progress, and comedy as the great dissolver of artifice. The Egoist is the extreme expression of his recurrent theme: the defeat of egoism by the power of comedy.

Reviews

'Splendid...the tale is as historically stimulating as it is stirringly exciting'

—— Sunday Telegraph

'What a hero! What an author! What a book! A joy for the lover of adventure and military buff alike'

—— The Times

We have joined for action and to see the world and that is what we get...a novel for our time, perhaps?

—— Spectator

Hervey is the thinking man's Sharpe. Mallinson is the true heir to Patrick O'Brian

—— Daily Mirror

'Mallinson's descriptions of regimental life and of the campaigns themselves ... crackle with detail and atmosphere ... Makes for an engrossing read, full of blood and valour.'

—— Observer

'An epic adventure...a book with a texture as rich as cut velvet, and a storyline as detailed as a Bruges tapestry. Patrick O'Brian may no longer be with us. But Mallinson has obviously taken up the historical baton'

—— The Birmingham Post

'Allan Mallinson...has already achieved a considerable priase for his brand of derring-do in his first novel, A Close Run Thing...a début of real excitement and verve. With The Nizam's Daughters, the author has overcome the second hurdle with equal aplomb...Mallinson is a genuine storyteller'

—— Amazon.co.uk
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