My Life in Middlemarch (Mead) - Book Reviews

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