was in effect preparation for The Egoist, published in 1879, which applies some of his theories, in particular his idea of comedy as "the ultimate civiliser". He followed it with The Tragic Comedians (1880), which was written quickly and without great conviction. Popular success did not come easily to Meredith. The Egoist was a turning point inasmuch it brought him widespread critical recognition. One of several of his works which highlight the subjugation of women during the Victorian period, it was considered by W. E. Henley, who reviewed it in at least four publications and possibly as many as seven, to make him "a companion for Balzac and Richardson, an intimate for Fielding and Cervantes". The critic for the New Quarterly Magazine commented, "We pay Mr Meredith a high compliment when we say he enables the reader to understand what is meant by Comedy, in the best and fullest sense of the word." His most commercially rewarding novel was Diana of the Crossways, published in 1885, which attracted notice because of its relationship to real-life events involving Caroline Norton and Lord Melbourne. Margaret Harris explains that "like many of Meredith's novels, Diana contains commentary on the aims and techniques of fiction, made particularly potent by Diana's being herself a novelist dedicated to 'reading the inner as well as exhibiting the outer'". George Gissing wrote to his brother, "By hook or crook, get hold of Diana of the Crossways. The book is right glorious. Shakespeare in modern English", and William Cosmo Monkhouse wrote in the Saturday Review that "amongst all his intellectual and literary feats, Mr Meredith has, perhaps, never accomplished one more striking". Diana was his first book to make an impression in America. Influence in literary circles Meredith supplemented his often uncertain writer's income with a job as a publisher's reader. His advice to Chapman & Hall made him influential in the world of letters, and he was capable of reading as many as ten manuscripts a week, though his judgement was not always reliable; Ellen Wood's novel East Lynne was rejected by Chapman & Hall on his say-so yet went on, when published by Richard Bentley, to be a bestseller. His friends in the literary world included, at different times, William and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Cotter Morison, Leslie Stephen, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Gissing and J. M. Barrie. Gissing wrote in a letter to his