Your Life in Middlemarch: A Live Conversation with Rebecca Mead

By SadieStein | February 10, 2014 | 10:07pm

Books Entertainment

Growing up as a bookish, ambitious young woman in England, Rebecca Mead found Middlemarch
life-changing: the vitality of its characters, the wisdom of its prose,
and the evocation of a “provincial life” that echoed one she knew. She
also made a lifelong friend in the remarkable George Eliot, a woman who
triumphed in the Victorian literary establishment, all the while writing
highly unusual fiction – and, not incidentally, living in sin with a
married man.

Middlemarch is a book about a young woman coming into her own. Mead’s memoir, My Life in Middlemarch, is,
too: Mead leads us through the novel and points to its contemporary
relevance, all the while sharing her own, parallel journey. My Life in Middlemarch is
a terrific companion piece for anyone who knows and loves the novel.
But it stands on its own: as a personal story, or as an introduction to
the book Virginia Woolf called “one of the few English novels written
for grown-up people.”