by Rebecca Mead
First published 2014
Rebecca Mead opens her story as a young woman discovering George Eliot's Middlemarch in an English coastal town. She carries the novel through Oxford, across the Atlantic to America, and into her career as a journalist. Through love affairs, marriage, and motherhood, Mead returns to the book again and again. Virginia Woolf called it "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," and Mead finds in it what contemporary life and literature cannot provide. She weaves together three narratives: her own biography, Eliot's life story, and the cultural history of the novel itself. Mead structures her book to mirror Eliot's original, exploring themes of love's complications, marriage's significance, moral foundations, and the cycle of dreams and disappointments. She discovers striking parallels between her own experiences and those of George Eliot, creating a meditation on how great books continue to speak across generations.
Genres: biography, literary-criticism, literary-fiction, biography-memoir, 21st-century, books-about-books, academic, cultural-studies
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: America, Atlantic, England, Oxford
Period: 21st-century
293 pages · Hardcover · Crown Publishers