Modern Love’s Sonnet XVII is perhaps George Meredith’s most overt commentary on
modern marriage,calling attention to marriage as a performance and a social fantasy.
Published in 1862, the husband and wife of the sequence become actors in a “contagious
game,” hosting a dinner party for guests:
At dinner, she is hostess, I am host.
Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps
The Topic over intellectual deeps
In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.
With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:
It is in truth a most contagious game:
Hiding the Skeleton, shall be its name. (Meredith 1948, XVII;lines1–7)

Sarah Kersh is a professor of English at Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit Taylor and Francis's Website. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08905495.2022.2057150

Bauer, Pearl Chaozon, and Sarah E. Kersh. Queer Temporality in Victorian Love and Marriage Poems. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 44, no. 2 (2022): 193-210. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08905495.2022.2057150