‘My Life in Middlemarch’: Can life imitate fiction?
Brooklyn BookBeat: Brooklyn Author To Read in Fort Greene, Park Slope
“I loved ‘Middlemarch’, and I loved being the kind of person who loved it,” writes Brooklynite Rebecca Mead in her new book, “My Life in Middlemarch,” published last week by Crown. In this insightful work — part memoir, part biography, part literary criticism — Mead, a staff writer for The New Yorker, revisits the great English novel that figured so prominently in her personal growth to reveal how fiction can help us understand our personal realities.
In a recent New York Times book review, Joyce Carol Oates refers to “My Life in Middlemarch” as a “bibliomemoir — a subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate, confessional tone of autobiography.” Oates describes Mead’s work as a “beguilingly straightforward, resolutely orthodox and unshowy account of the writer’s lifelong admiration for George Eliot and for ‘Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life’ in particular.”
Mead’s text is unpretentious and enthralling: she is analytical yet intimate as she guides her readers through her discovery and understanding of “Middlemarch” — a journey that began when Mead was an antsy 17-year-old living in a small English coastal town. Itching for adventure, Mead identified with Eliot’s protagonist, Dorothea Brooke, who yearns for more meaning in her life.