dixiet's review against another edition
4.0
I read Middlemarch, for the first time at age 57, and then this book. I am very glad I followed one with the other; it really helped illuminate Middlemarch and George Eliot for me.
turrean's review against another edition
3.0
Found this fascinating, as I just finished Middlemarch myself. I think I was expecting to read the ways the actual story of Middlemarch influenced the author. Instead, it's how the story of Eliot herself, and all her writing, influenced Mead. I was a little wistful for more on Middlemarch itself, and less on Mead's travels to Eliot shrines.
mjsteimle's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting book. This is part memoir, part biography, and perhaps a tinge of literary criticism. The author talks about her own experiences reading Middlemarch at various points in her life and points out how the themes and characters have taken on new meanings according to the events in her own life. She also provides a lot of information about George Eliot's life and explores some of the influences that may have colored her writing of the novel.
I really liked listening to this as an audiobook; it went quickly. Had I been reading a hard copy I may not have found it quite as interesting.
I really liked listening to this as an audiobook; it went quickly. Had I been reading a hard copy I may not have found it quite as interesting.
yaelshayne's review against another edition
4.0
I really enjoyed this book. Mead does a lovely job of weaving in a little bit of Middlemarch, a little bit of Eliot's life, a little bit of her own life, all in a cohesive story about how literature is meaningful in our own lives. Very scholarly but very engaging.
lola425's review against another edition
3.0
Decent read. Made me want to re-read Middlemarch. Also made me reflect on books that influenced me.
emma_reading_love's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
4.0
This one was hard to rate. There were parts I particularly liked and parts that weren’t for me. I loved learning more about George Eliot’s life. I really enjoyed learning more about Middlemarch, as this is one of my all time favorite books. But the author’s personal stories fell flat for me, and there were two or three sections where she focused overlong on topics that felt off topic, like going deep into the story of one of George Eliot’s sons. But overall I enjoyed this book. I’d recommend it to anyone who loves Middlemarch.
readingthethings's review against another edition
4.0
“Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
⋆.ೃ࿔࿐ྂ For some reason, what stood out the most for me when I read My Life in Middlemarch was the explanation of George Eliot’s pen name: I assumed she chose the name “George” because one of her favorite writers was George Sand. Apparently, her pen name was a tribute to George Lewes, the love of her life. George because he was George, obviously, and Eliot for, “To L(ewes), I owe it.”
I assumed George Eliot was rather cold and intellectual. Apparently she was far more Marianne Dashwood than Elinor. The whole beginning of Middlemarch, where we see Celia and Dorothea interact? That’s very inspired by Austen. Two sisters, one sensible, the other passionate, embarking on life as wives. And Dorothea? Not the sensible one! Celia is the sensible one. Dorothea is idealistic and passionate and all feeling. There are weddings throughout Middlemarch. It begins with one, but Eliot’s point? The wedding is not the end of the story. And young love and young ambition are not necessarily sensible in the big picture — and it isn’t necessarily true that everyone lives happily ever after. And the death of love and ambition isn’t necessarily dramatic: it can be slow and sad and anticlimactic. But then, love can also be profound and transforming. It can happen early in life, or long after one has thought love was long over for them. As in the case with George Lewes, who was apparently as individualistic and intelligent and self-possessed as George Eliot, and who deeply, deeply loved her, and who encouraged her to write fiction, and who read her works as she wrote, and to whom we may owe Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, The Mill on the Floss and other works, because he believed in her, and he told her she could do it. “To L(ewes), I owe it.” ❤️
Some friend of Eliot’s (I forget who, but I strongly think it was Lewes, whom we can agree likely knew her best) apparently said that Dorothea was the character in all of her novels who most closely resembled George Eliot. Eliot, like Dorothea, was idealistic and hopeful and wanted to affect the world and transform people. In her youth she came off a little preachy and stiff. By the time she wrote Middlemarch, she was, like Causabon, beginning to fear that her life would end before her life’s work could be completed. She strongly disliked a didactic novel. By the time she wrote Middlemarch, she wanted to show life — honestly, empathetically — not preach her own message. Indeed, she felt that to expect a moral or lesson as a reader meant that one lacked emotional imagination. Don’t crave a tidy lesson, she might say. Read all of this, see it from all the points of view, and develop your own conclusions. Far more than offering a tidy moral, she wanted to show her readers that you can step into the perspective of people, and see through their eyes, and realize that their life is not any more ridiculous or glorious than your own, and this is how we change the world. Not by large, dramatic acts, but by realizing that we all have a perspective, we all have history, we all have unrealized hopes. Learn empathy. Learn it in your marriage, learn it in the world. See it through another’s eyes. That, if anything, was her message.
ஜ “If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” Eliot once wrote. “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.”
ஜ “… The minds which are pre-eminently didactic — which insist on a lesson and despise everything that will not convey a moral, are deficient in sympathetic emotion,” she writes. “A man who is perpetually thinking in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admonition, can have little energy left for simple emotion.”
My Life in Middlemarch is a biography of Eliot as well as a memoir of the way her novel effected Rebecca Mead. It discusses how Mead’s response to the novel changed as she advanced in her own life. How Mead’s idea of romantic love at twenty changed by forty-five, and how she can now see what Eliot was saying in the parts of Middlemarch she overlooked in her youth: that as young people we cannot believe that romance could exist beyond twenty, but that love, perhaps even more deep than young love, can come along in mid-life, and it is different, and solid, and deep. She missed this in her early reads of the novel, because she’d never experienced it.
My Life in Middlemarch weaves between nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century responses to Middlemarch. It covers, well, the things any reader would be saying about her favorite author like — the experience of seeing edits on the original manuscripts of Eliot’s works! (I loved those passages, when Mead suddenly took us into a library to look at THE ACTUAL MANUSCRIPT OF MIDDLEMARCH WITH HANDWRITTEN EDITS. The book also talks nostalgically about the sites Eliot describes in her novels, and how disheartening Mead finds it that they’ve been transformed by time, and how those places are actually where Mead grew up, so full circle achieved, and all that. It discusses the importance of childhood memories in Eliot’s life as well as Mead’s, and how this was a big part of Eliot’s philosophy: remember those early days, they have made you. It covers Eliot’s letters and hopes and loves, her deep, sudden relationship with Lewes, and how courageous she was to choose to be with him rather than avoid him due to societal laws. It claims that, despite the legacy of her controversial relationship with Lewes, Eliot wasn’t “being a feminist” when she chose him — she made an enormously difficult choice which brought her to tears, because love was worth it, and she couldn’t let love like that go for principle which existed outside herself.
The book is really just a gentle journey through Eliot’s life, written by a woman who clearly respects her, but speaks about her intelligently and with candor, acknowledging both the good and the questionable in Eliot’s character. Which isn’t to say she uncovers horrible things about Eliot. Actually, I walk away from this biography liking Eliot A LOT. I just mean, this isn’t a swoony ode to Eliot. It’s an approachable but intellectual piece of writing, and one of the best biographies I’ve read so far. I love that it’s both personal and scholarly, without being either sappy or stuffy.
I had no idea I would find myself identifying with Eliot at a personal level, when I read this book. I thought she’d be dusty and distant. I have been doing this classics project for six years, and still I am surprised when I find out classic authors are people. Eliot was all about EMOTION. FEEL IT. HAVE EMPATHY. IF YOU CANNOT FEEL, YOU ARE NOT ALIVE. I didn’t expect that. I had no idea she’d be on that page with me.
Oh, also? Apparently Eliot was considered quite ugly externally (sadly this was a topic of frequent discussion), but when she spoke, she transformed the room. People would approach her appalled by her face, and then she would speak, and her mind and heart made her face absolutely irrelevant, even beautiful. More than once, apparently, people would fall in love with her based on her mind. If this is not a legacy, I don’t know what is.
People in her neighborhood remember her walking along with Lewes through gardens, deep in conversation. They were considered a physically unattractive pair, and were equally appalling to some for their casual “take it or leave it” philosophy on that point. LOVE that.
I’m grateful for this book. Give me more Eliot. ⋆.ೃ࿔࿐ྂ
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
⋆.ೃ࿔࿐ྂ For some reason, what stood out the most for me when I read My Life in Middlemarch was the explanation of George Eliot’s pen name: I assumed she chose the name “George” because one of her favorite writers was George Sand. Apparently, her pen name was a tribute to George Lewes, the love of her life. George because he was George, obviously, and Eliot for, “To L(ewes), I owe it.”
I assumed George Eliot was rather cold and intellectual. Apparently she was far more Marianne Dashwood than Elinor. The whole beginning of Middlemarch, where we see Celia and Dorothea interact? That’s very inspired by Austen. Two sisters, one sensible, the other passionate, embarking on life as wives. And Dorothea? Not the sensible one! Celia is the sensible one. Dorothea is idealistic and passionate and all feeling. There are weddings throughout Middlemarch. It begins with one, but Eliot’s point? The wedding is not the end of the story. And young love and young ambition are not necessarily sensible in the big picture — and it isn’t necessarily true that everyone lives happily ever after. And the death of love and ambition isn’t necessarily dramatic: it can be slow and sad and anticlimactic. But then, love can also be profound and transforming. It can happen early in life, or long after one has thought love was long over for them. As in the case with George Lewes, who was apparently as individualistic and intelligent and self-possessed as George Eliot, and who deeply, deeply loved her, and who encouraged her to write fiction, and who read her works as she wrote, and to whom we may owe Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, The Mill on the Floss and other works, because he believed in her, and he told her she could do it. “To L(ewes), I owe it.” ❤️
Some friend of Eliot’s (I forget who, but I strongly think it was Lewes, whom we can agree likely knew her best) apparently said that Dorothea was the character in all of her novels who most closely resembled George Eliot. Eliot, like Dorothea, was idealistic and hopeful and wanted to affect the world and transform people. In her youth she came off a little preachy and stiff. By the time she wrote Middlemarch, she was, like Causabon, beginning to fear that her life would end before her life’s work could be completed. She strongly disliked a didactic novel. By the time she wrote Middlemarch, she wanted to show life — honestly, empathetically — not preach her own message. Indeed, she felt that to expect a moral or lesson as a reader meant that one lacked emotional imagination. Don’t crave a tidy lesson, she might say. Read all of this, see it from all the points of view, and develop your own conclusions. Far more than offering a tidy moral, she wanted to show her readers that you can step into the perspective of people, and see through their eyes, and realize that their life is not any more ridiculous or glorious than your own, and this is how we change the world. Not by large, dramatic acts, but by realizing that we all have a perspective, we all have history, we all have unrealized hopes. Learn empathy. Learn it in your marriage, learn it in the world. See it through another’s eyes. That, if anything, was her message.
ஜ “If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” Eliot once wrote. “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.”
ஜ “… The minds which are pre-eminently didactic — which insist on a lesson and despise everything that will not convey a moral, are deficient in sympathetic emotion,” she writes. “A man who is perpetually thinking in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admonition, can have little energy left for simple emotion.”
My Life in Middlemarch is a biography of Eliot as well as a memoir of the way her novel effected Rebecca Mead. It discusses how Mead’s response to the novel changed as she advanced in her own life. How Mead’s idea of romantic love at twenty changed by forty-five, and how she can now see what Eliot was saying in the parts of Middlemarch she overlooked in her youth: that as young people we cannot believe that romance could exist beyond twenty, but that love, perhaps even more deep than young love, can come along in mid-life, and it is different, and solid, and deep. She missed this in her early reads of the novel, because she’d never experienced it.
My Life in Middlemarch weaves between nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century responses to Middlemarch. It covers, well, the things any reader would be saying about her favorite author like — the experience of seeing edits on the original manuscripts of Eliot’s works! (I loved those passages, when Mead suddenly took us into a library to look at THE ACTUAL MANUSCRIPT OF MIDDLEMARCH WITH HANDWRITTEN EDITS. The book also talks nostalgically about the sites Eliot describes in her novels, and how disheartening Mead finds it that they’ve been transformed by time, and how those places are actually where Mead grew up, so full circle achieved, and all that. It discusses the importance of childhood memories in Eliot’s life as well as Mead’s, and how this was a big part of Eliot’s philosophy: remember those early days, they have made you. It covers Eliot’s letters and hopes and loves, her deep, sudden relationship with Lewes, and how courageous she was to choose to be with him rather than avoid him due to societal laws. It claims that, despite the legacy of her controversial relationship with Lewes, Eliot wasn’t “being a feminist” when she chose him — she made an enormously difficult choice which brought her to tears, because love was worth it, and she couldn’t let love like that go for principle which existed outside herself.
The book is really just a gentle journey through Eliot’s life, written by a woman who clearly respects her, but speaks about her intelligently and with candor, acknowledging both the good and the questionable in Eliot’s character. Which isn’t to say she uncovers horrible things about Eliot. Actually, I walk away from this biography liking Eliot A LOT. I just mean, this isn’t a swoony ode to Eliot. It’s an approachable but intellectual piece of writing, and one of the best biographies I’ve read so far. I love that it’s both personal and scholarly, without being either sappy or stuffy.
I had no idea I would find myself identifying with Eliot at a personal level, when I read this book. I thought she’d be dusty and distant. I have been doing this classics project for six years, and still I am surprised when I find out classic authors are people. Eliot was all about EMOTION. FEEL IT. HAVE EMPATHY. IF YOU CANNOT FEEL, YOU ARE NOT ALIVE. I didn’t expect that. I had no idea she’d be on that page with me.
Oh, also? Apparently Eliot was considered quite ugly externally (sadly this was a topic of frequent discussion), but when she spoke, she transformed the room. People would approach her appalled by her face, and then she would speak, and her mind and heart made her face absolutely irrelevant, even beautiful. More than once, apparently, people would fall in love with her based on her mind. If this is not a legacy, I don’t know what is.
People in her neighborhood remember her walking along with Lewes through gardens, deep in conversation. They were considered a physically unattractive pair, and were equally appalling to some for their casual “take it or leave it” philosophy on that point. LOVE that.
I’m grateful for this book. Give me more Eliot. ⋆.ೃ࿔࿐ྂ
litletters's review against another edition
3.0
It's hard to objectively rate and review this as I so recently finished Middlemarch myself and am head over heels in love, and have no head for literature critiques. I enjoyed this--and Mead's passion for Eliot's work is obvious--but ultimately was left wishing for...more. And then I ended up rereading chunks of Middlemarch. Which perhaps was Mead's purpose all along, ha.