voice there and the sexist attitudes exhibited by the husband contributes to this. In an article in the Victorian Newsletter, Hans Ostrom points out the way in which the husband "has fallen back on the most mechanically formulaic way of perceiving the troubled marriage; the problem. . . no longer exists in the marriage, but rather in the wife's femininity, in the fact that she is acting "like a woman". Double standards apply when women seek the same solace as have men in the past outside the marriage. The husband has to face this when, in sonnet 7, he sees his wife as the attractive woman that others may find her through an imaginative reconstruction of his own mental habits, yet falls back on the demand on her, not simply for social prudence in behaviour but for emotional faithfulness to himself in addition. The irony of Meredith's title points to the fact that "modern love" is of this different and more demanding kind after the decay of the old attitude of male matrimonial complaisance. Beyond marriage as the arrangement of a social contract connected with wealth and position, emotional fidelity is a new and impossible requirement. Modern love, in this new context, is a hypocritical keeping up of appearances in the face of Darwinian pressures to act otherwise: Then if we study nature we are wise. Thus do the few who live but with the day. The scientific animals are they. [Sonnet 30] Meredith is examining what is essentially an insoluble problem and by the end of the sequence comes to no certain conclusion. Bibliography Hemberger, Anna. “Change is in the Air-But Can the Victorians Smell It?: Meredith's Modern Love as a Telling Aroma”, Victorian Web Holmes, John. "Darwinism, Feminism, and the Sonnet Sequence: Meredith's Modern Love", Victorian Poetry 48. 4, (Winter 2010), West Virginia University Press Mermin, Dorothy M. "Poetry as Fiction: Meredith's Modern Love”, ELH 43.1, (Spring, 1976), The Johns Hopkins University Press Moore, Natasha. [https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/229390495.pdf "Finding a Form for Modern Love: The Marriage of Form and Content in George Meredith's Modern Love'], University of Sydney 2014 Ostrom, Hans. "The Disappearance of Tragedy in Meredith's Modern Love. Victorian Newsletter'' 63 (Spring 1983): 26-30. References External links 1862 books English poetry collections Works by George Meredith Victorian poetry Sonnets