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Sign up todayMy Life in Middlemarch
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Learn moreA 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, reportage, 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 the author herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.
Rebecca Mead is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.
Kate Reading has recorded hundreds of audiobooks across many genres, over a thirty year plus career. Audie Awards: The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (mystery), Breasts (non-fiction), Bellwether (fiction), and Words of Radiance (fantasy), co-narrated with her husband, Michael Kramer. Among other awards, she has been recognized with: the ALA Booklist best of 2019 for Bowlaway (fiction), AudioFile Magazine Voice of the Century, Earphones Awards, Narrator of the Year, Best Voice in Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Publisher’s Weekly’s Listen-Up Award. She records at her home studio, Madison Productions, Inc., in Maryland.
Reviews
“A perfectly composed offering of literary love and self-observation.”
“A wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English.”
“A wonderfully intelligent exploration of a great novel and its great author.”
“A thoroughly engaging mix of memoir and biography…If you haven’t ever read Middlemarch, Mead’s lucid writing will send you straight to the bookstore. A-”
“Beguilingly straightforward, resolutely orthodox, and unshowy account…A poignant testimony to the abiding power of fiction.”
“Mead’s middle-aged rediscovery of Middlemarch—and her insights into Eliot’s rich middle age—is not to be missed.”
“Beautifully conveys the excitement of living in a novel, of knowing its characters as if they breathed.”
“A rare and remarkable fusion of techniques that draws two women together across time and space.”
“The wonderful Kate Reading is the ideal narrator for this quintessentially British audiobook. She’s a master of intonation and offers the most lovely of accents to enliven this unusual text.”
“Deeply satisfying…Brings to vivid life the profound engagement that she and all devoted readers experience with a favorite novel over a lifetime.”
“Mead demonstrates through her own story how literature can change and transform lives.”
“[Mead] performs an exhilarating, often surprising close reading of the novel…and she takes a fresh look at Eliot’s daringly unconventional life.’
“This book is probably the reason I first read Middlemarch…I thought the book was marvelously researched, and full of useful tidbits about the context of the world Middlemarch came from.”
“Marvelous.”
“My Life in Middlemarch is both unclassifiable and irresistible: a smart, absorbing glimpse into two lives—George Eliot’s and Rebecca Mead’s—as well as a lively meditation on Middlemarch. Intelligent, insightful, and generous in her judgments, Mead is a delightful guide—winsome and engaging.”
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