My life in Middlemarch / Rebecca Mead.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-293).

Miss Brooke -- Old and young -- Waiting for death -- Three love problems -- The dead hand -- The widow and the wife -- Two temptations -- Sunrise and sunset.

Part literary criticism, part biography, and part memoir, this extremely creative book charts the many ways in which George Eliot's Middlemarch has shaped the life of Mead , who came across the novel for the first time when she was a teenager studying for her university entrance examinations during the 1980s. Like Eliot's Dorothea, Mead yearned to escape her provincial surroundings in the southwest of England for the more sophisticated, intellectually satisfying life of the city. The first in her family to attend college, Mead went on to Oxford, studied journalism, and eventually became a staff writer for The New Yorker. Throughout these experiences, Middlemarch remained a constant fixture in her life. Mead returned to the novel again and again, realizing new insights and nuances as she grew and matured. Through this literary journey, she discovers that provincialism is not only a matter of geography but also a state of mind. More memoirist than literary critic, Mead demonstrates through her own story how literature can change and transform lives. For this reason, even the reader who has never heard of George Eliot will find Mead's crisp, exacting prose absorbing and thought-provoking.