The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot

At the age of seventeen, Rebecca Mead read Middlemarch for the first time, and has read it again every five years since, each time interpreting and discovering it anew. In The Road to Middlemarch she writes passionately about her relationship to this remarkable, much-loved Victorian novel, and shows how we can live richer and more fulfilling lives through our profound engagement with great literary works. Published when George Eliot was fifty-one, Middlemarch has at its centre one of literature's most compelling and ill-fated marriages, and some of the most tenderly drawn characters. Its vast canvas incorporates the lives of ordinary people and their most intimate struggles. Virginia Woolf famously described it as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people', and Mead explores how the ambitions, dreams and attachments of its characters teach us to value the limitations of our everyday lives. Interweaving readings of Middlemarch with an investigation of George Eliot's unconventional, inspiring life and Mead's reflections on her own youth, relationships and marriage, this is a sensitive work of deep reading and biography, for every lover of literature who cares about why we read books and how they read us.

'The New Yorker writer revisits George Eliot's classic.' --'2014 in Books', Guardian

'Scholarly but most entertaining... Mead winningly melds personal memoir and literary biography, with thoughtful reading exploring how Middlemarch addresses fundamental questions about life and love. It's so good it sent me scampering eagerly back to Eliot's novel despite reading it for my book group only about six months ago' --'Book of the Week' preview, Bookseller

'A beguilingly account of the writer's lifelong admiration for George Eliot and Middlemarch. Admirable, endearing and evocative... a poignant testimony to the power of fiction' --Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times

'A beautifully written and charming book. The literary criticism of Middlemarch is acute and original' --Book Oxygen

'A beguilingly account of the writer's lifelong admiration for George Eliot and Middlemarch. Admirable, endearing and evocative... a poignant testimony to the power of fiction' --Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times

'The Road to Middlemarch is no dry academic study, but a complex and sensitive work of art in its own right. Mead skilfully balances the various strands of literary biography, textual analysis and personal memoir. A powerful evocation of how books are read' --The List

'Intriguing... The Road to Middlemarch is a thoughtful and perceptive account of Eliot's masterpiece. Mead is so deft she lightly covers an abundance of fact without the reader noticing. This is a valuable and most readable homage' --Herald

'Mead knits her material together with great skill and in prose that is always lucid and sometimes soaringly beautiful. Her reading of Middlemarch is close, generous and intelligent. There's wisdom in her analysis' --Observer

'I wish more critical books were this literary, and this readable. It's the perfect companion volume to her heroine's masterpiece' --Evening Standard

'Ambitious, elegant, intense and absorbing - even if Middlemarch isn't your favourite book' --Samantha Ellis, Literary Review

'Her captivating and lucid book mixes biography, memoir and close reading to symphonic effect' --Financial Times

'A captivating and lucid book' --'Top Summer Reads', Financial Times

'A glorious celebration of Middlemarch' --'Top Summer Reads', Sunday Times

'Heartfelt, eloquent and as calmly passionate as Eliot's own prose, the study that results weaves memoir, criticism, biography and quest into a seamless whole' --Paperback review, Boyd Tonkin, Independent

'Some see these literary tributes as parasitic, lesser works battening on the great. But if Mead assists Middlemarch in flowering for new readers, as she assuredly will, then she has more than done her job' --Paperback review, Sarah Churchwell, Guardian

'An insightful, smart and fond account both of Eliot and her character' --Paperback review, Sunday Herald

'Biography and criticism are deftly interwoven in an elegant, intelligent book that will delight Middlemarch nuts and new readers alike' --'Book of the Year', Sunday Times

'An insightful, smart and fond account both of Eliot and her character' --Paperback review, Sunday Herald

'A beguiling mixture of literary criticism, biography and personal memoir, Mead writes intelligently and movingly about her 'profound' and lifelong experience with George Eliot's classic text' --'Literary memoir of the year', Independent

'An insightful, smart and fond account both of Eliot and her character' --Paperback review, Sunday Herald