The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling the student and researcher to read the material themselves.

George Meredith: The Life and Writing of an Alteregoist is not only a critical biography of the Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith but also a portrait of the novel in the later nineteenth century. Interweaving analysis of Meredith’s novels and poems with discussion of his life, Richard Cronin focuses primarily on the books Meredith read and wrote—arguing that novels by the end of the nineteenth century were shaped as much by the reading as by the experience of their writers. Cronin places Meredith’s novels in relation to the work of his contemporaries including Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing. Organized thematically, the book explores Meredith’s personal side—including his hostility to biography, his origins as the son of a tailor, his marriages—as well as his reading habits, and the prose style that is the most complete expression of his strange but compelling personality.

George Meredith, 1828-1909, was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. This book is of particular interest to scholars interested in his early life, his relationships with his friends, his marriages, and of his work as a journalist. Discussions of his literary output are viewed partially through those relationships, which can be seen as "chatter about Harriet," the book is, nevertheless, replete with quotations from people who knew him during all the phases of his life.