Meredith's great forgotten novel brings these thoughts into focus. The language is of another century as is the social circumstance, but the central interest in Diana's headlong plunge toward herself is of a remarkable immediacy. When Diana's love affair goes on the rocks, we are not at all awash in regret, so absorbing are the real events of her inner life -- the excitement of her false independence, the swiftness with which she spins out of control, the ugliness when she feels threatened -- and so moving the intelligence with which she tries to take in the meaning of what she has lived. It is the drama of the self we are witnessing -- that astonishing effort to climb up out of original shame -- and the awful, implicit knowledge that love, contrary to all sentimental insistence, cannot do the job for us. For better and for worse, that effort is a solitary one, more akin to the act of making art than of making family. It acknowledges, even courts, loneliness. Love, on the other hand, fears loneliness, turns sharply away from it.