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My Life in Middlemarch

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth—Middlemarch—and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories.

Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage, and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.

In this wise and revealing work of biography, reportage, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece—the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure—and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of the author herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from October 7, 2013
      In this deeply satisfying hybrid work of literary criticism, biography, and memoir, New Yorker staff writer Mead (One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding) brings to vivid life the profound engagement that she and all devoted readers experience with a favorite novel over a lifetime. Her love affair with Middlemarch and its author, George Eliot, began when 17-year-old Mead was growing up in southwest England. Here, she wants to “go back to being a reader,” and sets out to rediscover Eliot, visiting the places Eliot lived, studying her letters, and even holding a journal in Eliot’s own handwriting. In Mead’s rendering, Eliot proves a deeply loving partner and devoted stepmother. Mead’s considerable scholarship is accessible and revelatory to anyone who cares about what Eliot calls “the common yearning of womanhood.” Mead, who identifies strongly with aspects of Eliot’s life and that of the characters in Middlemarch, returns to the novel during various stages of her life: as a young Englishwoman finding her way in New York; in relationships with difficult men; as a stepmother and wife; and eventually as the mother of a son. As Mead writes: “There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them… books that grow with the reader as the reader grows.” Passionate readers, even those new to Middlemarch, will relish this book. Agent: Kathy Robbins, the Robbins Office.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from May 15, 2014

      In her charming bibliomemoir, Mead (One Perfect Day) illustrates the power of great literature, revealing how a lifetime of reading George Eliot's Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life has influenced, and even transformed, her life. First released in serial format in 1871, Mary Ann Evans's--Eliot was a pen name--classic tale of 19th-century English country life features a diverse cast of characters and themes. When British-born Mead first read Middlemarch as a teenager, she immediately identified with those characters, who longed to escape provincial life. As Mead read and reread Middlemarch throughout her life, she found it always had something new and relevant to say to her. VERDICT Rich with information about Eliot's life and work and beautifully read by Kate Reading, this title will delight Eliot enthusiasts, contemporary memoir fans, and those who enjoy "books about reading books." ["Even the reader who has never heard of George Eliot will find Mead's crisp, exacting prose absorbing and thought-provoking," read the starred review of the Crown hc, LJ 12/13.]--Beth Farrell, Cleveland State Univ. Law Lib.

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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