The author talks about discovering Middlemarch , trying to debunk a George Eliot quote, and how a book shaped her own life.
Elisabeth C. Prochnik
On the Life Stories podcast (available on iTunes), memoir writers talk about their lives and the art of writing memoir. Recently, Rebecca Mead discussed My Life in Middlemarch , which combines elements of her own history with a literary biography of the 19th-century British novelist George Eliot and an appreciation of her most famous novel, Middlemarch — which Mead has read every five years or so for the last quarter-century. “Every time I go back to it,” she confides, “my relationship to it has evolved. I see different things in it, and it brings new things to me every time.”
Below are some highlights from that conversation — the entirety of which you can listen to right here:
Life Stories: Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch
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Mead first read Middlemarch when she was 17 years old…
“I was living in a provincial seaside town in England where I grew up and I was studying for the entrance exams to university. I was so seized by it and captivated by it, and I especially identified with the character of Dorothea Brooke, who was this young woman yearning for a more significant existence… as was I, desperate to get away from where I lived and where I was from and get out in the world and do something —although, like Dorothea, I didn't know exactly what that was going to be.
I knew that critics regarded it as the greatest novel written in the English language, and I wanted to know why. I wanted to be one of those people that understood why and to be among those that appreciated its greatness. Growing up in England, especially, Middlemarch is sort of a summit of English literature; it's one of those peaks that you attempt to surmount. So it was important not just to read it, but I wanted to have read it. I wanted to have conquered that particular summit.”
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