George Meredith, John S. Mill, and Liberalized Womanhood

This study focuses on the aristocratic heroine of Meredith’s The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper. It analyzes Meredith’s dissonant conceptualization of a liberalized (i.e., a quasi-liberal) womanhood and its sociopolitical paternalistic agency. While Meredith draws on Mill’s progressive views on the role of the clerisy (i.e., the learned elite), the art of management, and positive paternalism, he hails a conservatism that is androcentric and colonial. The importance of liberalized womanhood resides in its ability to reform the egoism of male citizens bent on perilous leisure, to qualify human capital through astute socio-managerial acts, and to outsource itself to the British Empire.