The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot - Hardcover

"New York Times" Bestseller "New York Times Book Review "Editor's Choice Featured on the "Entertainment Weekly" "Must" List ""My Life in Middlemarch" is a poignant testimony to the abiding power of fiction." --Joyce Carol Oates, "The New York Times Book Review""Clearly, this book was a pleasure for Mead to write--it's personal, intimate, yet rigorously researched--and it seems to have deepened her relationship with the novel she loves so much. Her passion proves infectious for the reader as well, and "My Life in Middlemarch" will surely encourage readers to discover Eliot's masterpiece for the first time -- what an enviable experience -- or, like Mead, to regard it as a lifelong and steadfast companion." --"USA Today""Fans of this Victorian mainstay -- or, really, any book lover in a passionate long-term relationship with a novel -- will find Mead's research and analysis deeply gratifying. And if you haven't ever read "Middlemarch," Mead's lucid writing will send you straight to the bookstore... A-." --"Entertainment Weekly" "Anyone who believes that books have the power to shape lives and that 'our own lives can teach us how to read a book' will respond with fascination and delight to Mead's evolving appreciation of the richness and relevance of Eliot's masterwork." --Priscilla Gilman, "O Magazine" "Part memoir, part biography, part literary appreciation, "My Life in Middlemarch" is pure pleasure." --NPR "Mead's middle-aged rediscovery of "Middlemarch"--and her insights into Eliot's rich middle age--is not to be missed." --"The Atlantic" ""My Life in Middlemarch "is a deeply sympathetic and intelligent account of one woman's 'profound experience with a book', without doubt a love letter to Eliot's masterpiece, but also an important meditation on how our life experiences shape our reading, and our reading shapes how we choose to live our lives." --"The Daily Beast" "Mead's writing will make youn

At the age of seventeen, Rebecca Mead read Middlemarch for the first time, and has read it again every five years since, each time interpreting and discovering it anew. In The Road to Middlemarch she writes passionately about her relationship to this remarkable, much-loved Victorian novel, and shows how we can live richer and more fulfilling lives through our profound engagement with great literary works. Published when George Eliot was fifty-one, Middlemarch has at its centre one of literature's most compelling and ill-fated marriages, and some of the most tenderly drawn characters. Its vast canvas incorporates the lives of ordinary people and their most intimate struggles. Virginia Woolf famously described it as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people', and Mead explores how the ambitions, dreams and attachments of its characters teach us to value the limitations of our everyday lives. Interweaving readings of Middlemarch with an investigation of George Eliot's unconventional, inspiring life and Mead's reflections on her own youth, relationships and marriage, this is a sensitive work of deep reading and biography, for every lover of literature who cares about why we read books and how they read us.