My Life in Middlemarch
Rebecca Mead, 2014
Crown Publisher
578 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307984760
Summary
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, reporting, 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 Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1974 (?)
• Where—London, England, UK
• Raised—Southwest England
• Education—Oxford University; New York University
• Curently—lives in New York, New York, USA
Rebecca Mead has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1997. Born in England, she migrated to New York in her twenties where she attended New York University. She began her career as a fact-checker at New York Magazine and later became a contributing editor.
She has also contributed to many newspapers and magazines, including the Sunday Times of London, New York Times Book Review, and London Review of Books. In 2007 she published her first took, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding (2007), and in 2014 came out with her second, My Life in Middlemarch (2014). Mead lives in Brooklyn, New York City. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Rarely attempted, and still more rarely successful, is the bibliomemoir—a subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate, confessional tone of autobiography.... My Life in Middlemarch is a poignant testimony to the abiding power of fiction.... [Yet] admirable and endearing as [it] is, there are virtually no surprises here that have not been uncovered by Eliot biographers.
Joyce Carol Oates - New York Times Book Review
Mead explores how the broad themes of George Eliot’s Middlemarch—the quest for meaning, the nature of love, the power of home, and how to square great ambition with the realities of being a woman—resonate in her own life and remain relevant for modern readers.... [Mead] invites readers to consider this imperative through their relationships with influential books and in their own lives. In this way, she invites empathy, an exercise of which George Eliot would be unmistakably proud.
Emily Rapp - Boston Globe
Mead’s middle-aged rediscovery of Middlemarch—and her insights into Eliot’s rich middle age—is not to be missed.
Atlantic
(Starred review.) [D]eeply satisfying hybrid work of literary criticism, biography, and memoir.... [Mead] brings to vivid life the profound engagement that she and all devoted readers experience with a favorite novel over a lifetime.... 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.”
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Mead demonstrates through her own story how literature can change and transform lives. For this reason, even the reader who has never heard of George Eliot will find Mead's crisp, exacting prose absorbing and thought-provoking.
Library Journal
Mead beautifully conveys the excitement of living in a novel, of knowing its characters as if they breathed, of revisiting them over time and seeing them differently. She conveys, too, not at all heavy-handedly, the particular relationship one develops with an author whose work one loves….There is a meticulous underlying order to the book, structured to mirror Middlemarch itself, but as in a letter, the effect is of spontaneous movement, the particular thrill of following a mind untrammeled.
Clair Messud - Bookforum
(Starred review.) [Mead] performs an exhilarating, often surprising close reading of the novel, which Eliot began writing at age 51 in 1870. And she....injects just enough of her own life story to take measure of the profound resonance of Eliot’s progressive, humanistic viewpoint, recognition of the heroism of ordinary lives, and crucial central theme, a young woman’s desire for a substantial, rewarding, meaningful life.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Mead was wise not to omit herself from this story, as her feelings about the great work and its themes of women's roles, relationships and self-delusion are far more insightful than a barrage of facts would have bee ... A rare and remarkable fusion of techniques that draws two women together across time and space.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Explore the parallels between George Eliot’s life and Rebecca Mead’s. In their relationships and in their careers as writers, do they share a common approach to the human experience? Did the social constraints of Eliot’s gender put her at a disadvantage compared to contemporary writers, or did the constraints enhance her imaginative powers?
2. Discuss your own experience with Middlemarch, whether you’ve been a lifelong devotee or have only glimpsed it through Mead’s lens. Which storylines and relationships resonate the most with you? Which characters are the most intriguing to you?
3. What motivates Mead to retrace Eliot’s life? How does her research reshape her view of Eliot’s imaginary communities?
4. Browse the memoir’s chapter titles (which mirror the titles of the eight books in Middlemarch) as well as the epigraphs. What makes these lines equally appropriate for Mead’s modern world? Which epigraph could make an apt motto for your life?
5. What came to mind when you read Virginia Woolf’s characterization of Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”? Are happy endings and the marriage plot the stuff of childish fantasy? How does Eliot rank against Jane Austen, the Brontes, and Woolf as English women writers who contributed to your growth?
6. How do the various locales featured in My Life in Middlemarch—from New Haven and New York to Coventry, Oxford, and London—reflect the inner worlds described in their corresponding scenes? For Eliot and Mead, where is home?
7. As you read Mead’s exploration of Dorothea Brooke Casaubon, who wrestles with the yearnings of youth and must eventually confront the passionless marriage that marks her adulthood, how did these scenes compare to your own transformation, during and well beyond adolescence? Which books helped you find your way?
8. What freedoms and limitations did Eliot experience because of her unconventional relationship with George Henry Lewes? In your opinion, how did he and his sons (biological or not) affect Eliot’s approach to writing about male characters? From the duped scientist Tertius Lydgate to the feckless Fred Vincy, what broad observations can we make about the men who populate Middlemarch?
9. What does Mead’s memoir help us understand about motherhood in its many forms (including Eliot’s experience as a quasi-stepmother)? Is Eliot’s portrayal of motherhood in Middlemarch realistic or overly pessimistic?
10. Mead describes her pilgrimages to the archives that hold Eliot’s journals, manuscripts, and other documents, including Yale’s Beinecke Library, the New York Public Library, and the British Library. In addition to fact-gathering, what does Mead gain by spending time with pages that were touched by Eliot’s own hand? Does the digital age spell the end of that experience?
11. Mead raises the question of Eliot’s spirituality after she left the church. If her characters are a guide to us, how does Eliot seem to have approached the role of fate versus free will in shaping our destinies?
12. The eight books of Middlemarch were released by Blackwood as a series. How does reading those elaborate plots compare to watching a wildly popular television series? What special benefits does the written word provide?
13. After her dashed hopes with Herbert Spencer and the impossibility of marrying Lewes, was Eliot’s marriage to John Walter Cross a sort of victory?
14. Consider Middlemarch’s renowned closing line, which appears in the first paragraph of “Finale.” Which unhistoric acts, hidden lives, and unvisited tombs did you think of as you read those words?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)