Just Jennifer

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead (Crown, January 2014)

After what we would call high school, New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead, in a small coastal town in England, first read Middlemarch while she was working toward acceptance in Oxford.  She realized that the landscape George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans) described was waiting for her right outside her windows and that many of the people and feelings Eliot wrote about were as familiar to Mead as her own diary.  After her time at Oxford, Mead left England and came to New York to pursue a career in journalism, married and began a family.  The one thing that remained in her life was her love for Middlemarch and the quote from Virginia Woolf that the novel was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,”; it is this devotion to the novel that led Mead to reread it carefully, review the original texts and learn more about George Eliot and what might be considered her masterpiece.  Mead begins by describing how she felt when she first entered the fictitious town of Middlemarch and met Dorothea “…an ardent young gentlewoman who yearns for a more significant existence.” (Prologue, p. 2), a feeling to which the author can relate.  Moving back and forth between describing the structure of the novel (originally released in eight parts), Eliot’s life growing up, as a young woman who was eager to begin her career in writing and then as a successful author, Mead discusses the characters and setting of the book, putting them into the context of the time, sometimes injecting her own sensibilities and how what she is learning through her research relates to what has happened and is what is going on in her life.  In the Finale, Mead muses that in the end, Dorothea “has made her own progress, even if she has not had a chance to stray far beyond the boundaries of her provincial life…she discovers that the good she is able to do is in relation to the lives that touch her own more closely, even if doing so may be inconvenient or painful for her…It is here, that she makes her own discovery of what Middlemarch is about.”  Mead then reflects about Eliot’s time at Cherrimans and what vistas she might have seen and what Mead was able to see when she visited the house many years later.   Though there wasn’t the final homage I expected as to how Middlemarch made a difference in Mead’s life forever, she reflects as she watches her young son in his Brooklyn backyard and thinks of the history of those who had passed before him on that same land, carrying on the legacy of discovering what your place is and how it shapes you and generations to come, and as we all learn, our place may not be as provincial as we once thought.  A definite read for fans of 19^th-Century British Literature and one of several books published this year that reflect on a classic novel.  See http://hclibrary.us/lists/books.pdf for other suggestions.  

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for this review.