My Life in Middlemarch

Here’s what author Rebecca Mead said about a subject dear to our hearts, "Reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself."  This book is both a biography and travelogue of what many consider the world’s best novel—Middlemarch.  It also is a personal memoir by Mead. 

In the first chapter Mead recalls how many times she has read the novel and how much it has changed for her over time. What drew her as a child to it was how full of adult life the book was. She also loved the intelligence of the characters, particularly the heroine, Miss Dorothea Brooke.

Along the way we learn about the novel itself, how it was first published as a serial in eight parts with the subtitle “A Provincial Life.” It bore a male author’s name--George Eliot but even Charles Dickens, a contemporary of Eliot’s knew immediately that it was written by a woman. He said, “I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself, mentally, so like a woman, since the world began. “ Dickens also loved Eliot’s writing.  He said of her first novel, “Adam Bede has taken its place among the actual experiences and endurances of my life.”