Life, Wisdom And 'Middlemarch'

Life, love and “Middlemarch.” Rebecca Mead on why she can’t stop reading George Eliot's great Victorian novel.

George Eliot was a woman.  A Victorian.  A rebel.  Her great book, a novel,  was "Middlemarch." 1874.  It went deep, deep into the lives of provincial English men and women.  Their marriages.  Their dreams and ambitions. Their failings and delusions and small triumphs.  It’s a Victorian-era book of wisdom on life and love.  A century later, Rebecca Mead made "Middlemarch" a kind of personal Bible for life.  A guidebook on how to live.  How to see and empathize with others. This hour On Point:  New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead on George Eliot and living with Middlemarch.
-- Tom Ashbrook

Rebecca Mead, staff writer at The New Yorker. Author of "My Life in Middlemarch" and  "One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding." (@Rebeccamead_NYC)

Boston Globe: 'My Life In Middlemarch' By Rebecca Mead — "Mead illustrates how the reversal of the 19th-century marriage plot for which 'Middlemarch'’ is famous is inextricably linked to Eliot’s personal experience of a long lasting, committed union as a state of happiness that far outpaced the seemingly all-consuming tribulations of young love. This state of equal partnership is mirrored in Mead’s life, and it’s no wonder that this 'home epic' speaks to her and has continued to appeal to generations of readers, regardless of gender."

Salon: How great books shape us — "There’s a lot more going on in 'Middlemarch' than that, but the two bad marriages are what you notice if, like Mead, you’re a brainy young woman who wants to make something of herself and whose knowledge of life comes mostly from books. Eliot herself — born Mary Ann Evans, the daughter of a Midlands estate manager — was once just such a girl, and many readers first encounter 'Middlemarch' when they’re making the same sort of life decisions that confront Dorothea and Lydgate. 'My Life in Middlemarch' follows both Eliot and Mead as they obtain their educations and take their hard knocks from the world, while Mead explores which parts of Eliot’s life and social circle may have inspired parts of the novel."