A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youthMiddlemarchand 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 Eliots 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 grownup 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 Eliots masterpiecethe complexity of love the meaning of marriage the foundations of morality and the drama of aspiration and failureand brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliots biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Meads 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. show more