Mead is 17 when she encounters George Eliot's Middlemarch, and it's love at first read. "This book, which had been published serially in eight volumes almost a hundred years before I was born, wasn't dull or dusty, but arresting in the acuteness of its psychological penetration and the snap of its sentences...I couldn't believe how good it was. And I couldn't believe how relevant and urgent it felt." Middlemarch continues to speak to Mead over the years, revealing new aspects of itself—and herself—as she reads and rereads it.
In her forties, now a successful journalist, she finds herself uncomfortably aware of the "resignations that attend middle age, the paths untrodden and the choices unmade." Her self-cure for melancholy is to return to Middlemarch once more, more fully, immersing herself in the stories of Eliot, the novel, and her own life. Though My Life in Middlemarch might inspire you to reconsider the novel and its author if, like me, you have struggled to enter Eliot's fictional worlds, Mead's book is not merely a paean to that author. Rather, it's a love letter to reading itself, to the power of books and stories and our own curious, shape-shifting selves. As Mead writes, “There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them, or even more. There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree. This kind of book becomes part of our own experience, and part of our own endurance."
Buy My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead on Bookshop and Amazon. Crown, 2014.