George Meredith wrote sentences that make readers work, and built a career on the belief that comedy is the highest form of intelligence. His Essay on Comedy (1877) argued that a society's health can be measured by its capacity to laugh at itself thoughtfully rather than cruelly, and The Egoist (1879) is that theory executed. Sir Willoughby Patterne, the egoist of the title, is a wealthy landowner of impeccable manners whose entire being is organized around being admired, and the novel watches two women work out how to escape marrying him. Meredith gives Clara Middleton an interior life of unusual precision for 1879 and lets the reader see Willoughby exactly as she does. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) was removed from circulating libraries for indecency. Modern Love (1862), a sequence of fifty sixteen-line sonnets, dissects the collapse of a marriage with a coldness drawn from his own — his first wife left him for a painter and died estranged. He worked as a publisher's reader, rejecting East Lynne and Erewhon. He received the Order of Merit in 1905 and died in 1909.