Beauchamp's Career — Volume 5

Beauchamp's Career (1875) is a novel by George Meredith which portrays life and love in upper-class Radical circles and satirises the Conservative establishment. Nevil Beauchamp is a young naval officer with high ideals of honour and public service who, having been wounded in the Crimean War, recovers his health in Venice. He there falls in love with a brilliant and high-spirited French girl, Renée de Croisnel, with whom he hopes to elope. Renée marries an elderly French aristocrat instead, and Nevil takes up his naval career again.