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The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot

The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot

by RebeccaMead (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2014

    $3.17
Synopsis

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.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 304
 Publisher: Granta
Published: 06 Mar 2014
ISBN 10: 1847085156
ISBN 13: 9781847085153
Book Overview: A celebration of George Eliot's life, work and greatest novel, exploring through a mixture of literary biography, deep reading and personal memoir how Middlemarch answers fundamental questions about life and love

Media Reviews
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
Author Bio
Born in London and educated at Oxford and New York University, REBECCA MEAD has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1997. She lives in Brooklyn.