In a thousand novels of love-in-the-Western-world the progress of feeling between a woman of intelligence and a man of will is charted through a struggle that concludes itself when the woman at last melts into romantic longing and the deeper need for union. There are, however, a handful of remarkable novels written late in the last century and early in this one -- among them Daniel Deronda, The House of Mirth, Diana of the Crossways, Mrs. Dalloway -- where, at the exact moment the woman should melt, her heart unexpectedly hardens. Just at this place where give is required, some flat cold inner remove seems to overtake the female protagonist. In the eyes of the world she becomes opaque ("unnatural" she is called), but we, the privileged readers, know what is happening. The woman has taken a long look down the road of her future. What she sees repels. She cannot "imagine" herself in what lies ahead. Unable to imagine herself, she now thinks she cannot act the part. She will no longer be able to make the motions. The marriage will be a charade. In that moment of clear sight sentimental love, for her, becomes a thing of the past. Which is not to say the marriage will not take place; half the time it will. It is only to say that in these novels this is the point at which the story begins.

[...] Diana's husband feels the sting of her independence. He broods on it, then falls into a rage, brings suit against her, naming the MP as corespondent. But he cannot prove his case. The Warwicks separate and, with her reputation barely intact, Diana sets herself up as a political hostess and begins writing novels and articles to make a living. Soon her books are being reviewed, and every MP in town wants to have dinner at Diana's.

She blossoms into a glorious creature. Her mind grows tough, honest, wise, her speech witty, her insights luminous. She is unsentimental. She takes in her own experience. After the separation, alone for the first time, in ''lodgings," Diana receives her friend Lady Emma, who is appalled, and asks if she can really like this. Diana replies, "I do. Yes, I can eat when I like, walk, work -- and I am working! My legs and my pen demand it. Let me be independent! Besides, I begin to learn something of the bigger world outside the one I know, and I crush my mincing tastes. In return for that, I get a sense of strength I had not when I was a drawing room exotic. Much is repulsive. But I am taken with a passion for reality!"

As Diana's intelligence strengthens it takes in ever harder truths. She begins to see that her independence is intimately related to the clarity of her thought, and she comes to believe that the increasing goodness of her mind is linked to passions held in check. Passionate feeling, she is persuaded, is the undoing of a woman's independence. Diana gazes with a cold, clear eye -- remarkably cold -- at her calculation of life's cost. In London it is said of her that she is cold by nature. We, too, see her as cold, but not by nature.

[...] She'd rather place herself on the other side of the law (their law) than become a prisoner of her own weakest self. She will be vile but she will be free. Free to enter herself. Love, she knows, is not the way in. Into herself is through the mind, not through the senses. That is what freedom means to Diana.

She is wrong, of course. She will not be free. Free is not through the working mind or the gratified senses; free is through the steady application of self-understanding. Diana is too angry and too frightened to be free. In her panic she savages Percy and deforms herself. Like an animal in a frenzy, she tears loose of the trap, leaving behind a limb. For the rest of her life she will lick a wound covered over by scar tissue. Courage she has in great measure; it is self-knowledge she lacks.

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.