The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot

I’ve read Middlemarch twice, once as a teenager and once as an adult. Although I loved it the first time, it was the second reading that convinced me this was to be my favourite novel. Rebecca Mead reads Middlemarch every five years and each time finds more to admire. There is something truly remarkable in Eliot’s ability to create an epic story that still has such resonance today, despite the fact that the characters are confined to a provincial English town during a short period of time in the early 1830s.

The complicated genius of the author is something that Mead set out to discover along her road to Middlemarch. The subtitle is ‘My Life with George Eliot’, and certainly Mead uses reflections from her own life to explore her deeply personal relationship with the book, but this never feels like an indulgent autobiography; it’s almost as if it’s impossible to discuss the novel in any depth without conveying what it means to the reader. Nor does Mead shy away from discussing criticisms of both the book and its author; her research uncovers some letters written by Eliot that she finds difficult to read for their ‘embarrassing pretentiousness’. But it’s Mead’s close analysis of the book that I most enjoyed, from pages and pages examining a single paragraph to speculation about which acquaintances of Eliot’s might have inspired particular characters.

Although I suspect the reader will get more from Mead’s book if they have read Middlemarch at least once, it will certainly inspire others to revisit its pages. I think it’s time I got started on my third reading.

Kara Nicholson