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Crown
February 2014
On Sale: January 28, 2014
304 pages ISBN: 0307984761 EAN: 9780307984760 Kindle: B00EBRTZYK Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
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.
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