Will I love My Life in Middlemarch?

What do the writers you are drawn to reveal about you? Why at certain points in our lives do we become “attached” to certain authors? The process of attachment is mysterious. As we age (and change) some things remain constant. Our attachment to a particular author may have begun in our youth, but evolved as we have. To reconnect with a favorite author can put us in touch with our younger self in unexpected ways. Mead shows how much Middlemarch has “spoken” to her throughout her life. This book is perhaps more in harmony with my own than any on… show more.

Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch tells the story of Mead’s lifelong relationship with George Eliot and that writer’s greatest novel. As well as tracing the arc of Eliot’s biography and exploring its uncanny reverberations in Mead’s own life, Mead investigates the way in which her understanding of Middlemarch changed as she did. In a passage I might have written of my own evolving grasp of To the Lighthouse, she writes, “There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows… This kind of book becomes part of our own experience, and part of our own endurance.… show more.