Sir Willoughby Patterne is handsome, rich, generous and admired, and the novel is the slow, exact demonstration of what it is like to be engaged to him. Meredith's style won him more admirers among writers than readers — he worked for years as a publisher's reader — and here the difficulty pays: nobody has ever anatomised male vanity so completely, and Clara Middleton's attempts to get free are as tense as any thriller. Fifty-seven plates of Victorian and Edwardian painting, from Tissot to Orchardson, catch the novel's world of drawing rooms, sea pieces, and uneasy courtship in a single visual register.