Radio Derek Parker Stereotyping

Despite all the openness and free discussion, maternity leave for husbands and football for little girls, most men still go about exhibiting their fear that they will not appear men enough, and most women are still afraid that they will be thought only women. This was at the heart of a couple of recent programmes, the first of which was about the Victorian novelist, Meredith, in his work a total realist about sex, but whose treatment of his wife (explored in George Meredith in Love, Radio 4, 7 August) was a great deal less than liberal. Radio can add something to the conventional literary essay which examines a writer's work in the context of his life. A programme like this can set out both to tell a story in dramatic terms, using extracts from letters, novels and poems, and to show how that story is refined into the work of the chief protagonist. In this case, the story of Meredith's marriage, its collapse under the pressure of his literary ambition, his wife's affair with his best friend, the separation, the bitterness, is only moderately interesting; the real poignancy comes (as in some similar stories) at the end, when in two

works—The Egoist and the sonnetsequence, Modern Love, both quirky masterpieces—Meredith showed that, in age, he fully realised both the contribution he had made to the breakdown of his marriage, and the fearful pressures Victorian society put on the woman in an emotional relationship. Necessarily, this came at the end of the programme, which in the last ten minutes had a weight which at once gave it real value and almost fatally overbalanced it. Hugh Dickson, reading from the late novel and poem, gave his voice a...