Diana of the Crossways is one of George Meredith's most popular and critically acclaimed novels. When the book was first published in 1885, George Meredith was well known as an advocate for the rights of women. He encouraged their legal emancipation and women's suffrage. His writings reveal his sense of the injustice suffered by women because of constraints on their natural abilities.Diana of the Crossways illustrates a Victorian woman in the process of change as she attempts independence. The problems she faces offer a distinct departure from the treatment of conventional heroines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Meredith understood and wrote so well about the conflicts women faced that Diana of the Crossways depicts the struggles that led to a new feminism. Nikki Lee Manos's introduction draws upon a wide range of historical and critical texts, from John Stuart Mill's feminist tract of 1869 to Mary Poovey's contemporary theories about gender in Victorian fiction.Diana of the Crossways is a central text for the study of nineteenth-century representation of women and the Victorian women's rights movement. Students and scholars of nineteenth-century British literature, women's studies, and cultural studies will find this novel with its invaluable introduction a must read in understanding women during the Victorian era.