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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.
Our group at Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum did a slow read together of George Eliot's Middlemarch this past year. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience as we made our way through and discussed Dorothea, Lydgate, Causaubon, Mary, Rosamunde, and their lives. We touched on so many themes--marriage, money, progress, religion, etc. Find a group read like this and I guarantee the book will stay with you.
What a delight, then, to pick up My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead. Mead weaves Eliot's biography, and her correspondence along with major themes in Middlemarch and other works. Mead travels to the locations important to Eliot and then draws in a number of the same themes we discussed. This book was made all the richer having done the slow read. How for instance Eliot turned the standard novel on its head by starting the novel with a marriage instead of ending it ala Austen. She addresses Woolf's famous assessment that it is "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."
I especially enjoyed the glimpses into Eliot's domestic relationship with George Lewes and his children and how the people around her may have served as inspiration for various characters. Mead also touches on Eliot's writing process and obstacles (migraines, toothaches, and family illnesses). But also how Lewes and Eliot had what looks like a modern happy working relationship. Like Eliot, I found a true partner late in life and I certainly could relate to Mead's line, "To find a partner as accepting and generous as Lewes is a great and unexpected gift."
On the whole, I found this book enriched my Middlemarch experience, and as I am now working my way back through all of Eliot's works. ( )
It’s been over 25 years since I read Middlemarch for Victorian Lit in college, and I vaguely remember enjoying it (way more than Heart of Darkness which we also read, and I loathed) but not really any details; I much more remember where I read most of it which was in Charlotte while visiting my grandparents.
Mead’s love for the novel has me wanting to return to it, and I think I’ll be checking out the audiobook soon and prepping myself for thirty plus hours of listening. I loved learning more about George Eliot and her fairly untraditional but happy life; the mix of sources here was fascinating, and the author did a wonderful job with the tidbits she shared. My vivid memory of Victorian Lit was learning and truly understanding the word “earnest”, and it sounds as though Eliot was the epitome of earnestness.
As usual I love these reads which mingle memoir and biography, and having this also be a book about books (as she referred to other Eliot writings as well) truly made it perfect for me. ( )
I can see this is a marvellous, learned journey into a writer's love for the book, Middlemarch. I hope I have the patience to finish the audiobook.
Unlike the first commentator below, it's a long time since I read Middlemarch - and I remember that I was awed by it. Then many years later, but still a long time ago, I read a biography of Mary Ann Evans, and that was like stepping into a parallel Middlemarch universe. It was intensely interesting, perhaps in the sense of being a voyeur on a private person's life. One part I recall was how affected she was by knowing herself to be plain - hell! Could such a woman be plain?! ( )
I read 97 pages, then the last few. I think I'm done. It's a well-written and researched book, with lots of biographical information on George Eliot (or, more accurately, Mary Ann Evans)and how her circumstances influenced her writing and how that writing influenced Rebecca Mead. Having only read Middlemarch for the first time last month though, I think I've had enough of it for now, and possibly forever.
"My Life in Middlemarch" [is in the genre of] the bibliomemoir — a subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate, confessional tone of autobiography. ... Rebecca Mead’s “My Life in Middlemarch” is a beguilingly straightforward, resolutely orthodox and unshowy account of the writer’s lifelong admiration for George Eliot and for “Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life”
“My Life in Middlemarch” is an exemplary introduction to the work of George Eliot and a helpful and informed companion guide to “Middlemarch.”
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For my mother, and in memory of my father
Premiers mots
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When I was seventeen years old and still living in the seaside town where I spent my childhood, I would go for a few hours every Sunday morning to the home of a retired teacher of English literature to talk about books.
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
p 269 Finale. The final sentence of Middlemarch is one of the most admired in literature, and with good reason -- it is "quietly thrilling," ...The book ends, as it began, with Dorothea, and it discovers what may be redeemed from disappointment. ... It reads., "But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
Derniers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
But through that window was a larger vista: a landscape changed by books, reshaped by reading, transfigured by the slow green growth.
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 Hardcover edition.
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What a delight, then, to pick up My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead. Mead weaves Eliot's biography, and her correspondence along with major themes in Middlemarch and other works. Mead travels to the locations important to Eliot and then draws in a number of the same themes we discussed. This book was made all the richer having done the slow read. How for instance Eliot turned the standard novel on its head by starting the novel with a marriage instead of ending it ala Austen. She addresses Woolf's famous assessment that it is "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."
I especially enjoyed the glimpses into Eliot's domestic relationship with George Lewes and his children and how the people around her may have served as inspiration for various characters. Mead also touches on Eliot's writing process and obstacles (migraines, toothaches, and family illnesses). But also how Lewes and Eliot had what looks like a modern happy working relationship. Like Eliot, I found a true partner late in life and I certainly could relate to Mead's line, "To find a partner as accepting and generous as Lewes is a great and unexpected gift."
On the whole, I found this book enriched my Middlemarch experience, and as I am now working my way back through all of Eliot's works. (