Review by New York Times Review
rarely attempted, and still more rarely successful, is the bibliomemoir - a subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate, confessional tone of autobiography. The most engaging bibliomemoirs establish the writer's voice in counterpoint to the subject, with something more than adulation or explication at stake. Nicholson Baker's quirkily inspired book-length essay, "U and I," charts his youthful obsession with the sensuous, poised prose and public career of John Updike, yielding a curious double portrait that manages to be both self-effacing and arrogant. Geoff Dyer's "Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence" is a very funny if despairing account of the writer 's failure to produce the "sober, academic study" of Lawrence's work he has hoped to achieve, before becoming overcome by distractions and inertia and creating a "wild book" in its place. Christopher Beha's "The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else" is a warmly personal account of a young man's intensive reading of the Harvard Classics (51 volumes) amid a season of familial crisis and loss. Phyllis Rose's ironically titled "The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time" subordinates the magisterial "Remembrance of Things Past" to the busy, often trivial minutiae of the memoirist's daily life, while, as its ebullient title suggests, David Denby's "Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World" is a zestful anecdotal account of an adult returning to the education he'd failed to appreciate as a Columbia undergraduate. And there is Rick Gekoski's chatty "Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoir," which traces the influence of 25 books on the English bookseller-author's life. Each represents a risky appropriation of an exalted subject, and each fearlessly casts the memoirist's shadow over the text. By contrast, Rebecca Mead's "My Life in Middlemarch" is 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 - the Victorian novel, first published in the early 1870s, that was described by Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." There is no irony or postmodernist posturing in Mead's forthright, unequivocal and unwavering endorsement of George Eliot as both a great novelist and a role model for bright, ambitious, provincially bom girls like herself, eager to escape their intellectually impoverished hometowns - "Oxford was my immediate goal, but anywhere would do." At the age of 17, when Mead first reads "Middlemarch," her identification with Eliot's 19-year-old heroine, Dorothea Brooke, is immediate and unqualified, and it will last for decades. The book's theme, "a young woman's desire for a substantial, rewarding, meaningful life," was "certainly one with which Eliot had been long preoccupied.... And it's a theme that has made many young women, myself included, feel that 'Middlemarch' is speaking directly to us. How on earth might one contain one's intolerable, overpowering, private yearnings? Where is a woman to put her energies? How is she to express her longings? What can she do to exercise her potential and affect the lives of others? What, in the end, is a young woman to do with herself?" Today such earnest questions are more likely to be found in young adult fiction, but Victorian writers took seriously their duties, as Mead puts it, to "instruct and enlighten." Eliot's "inspiring principle," she adds, was to create work that would "gladden and chasten human hearts." Nor are these questions likely to have been applicable to Victorian women of the working class: Dorothea Brooke is the daughter of a well-to-do family, and financial concern will not guide her life choices. Instead, not unlike Henry James's equally idealistic, naïve and well-to-do young heroine, Isabel Archer, in "The Portrait of a Lady," Dorothea makes a disastrous marriage guided by bourgeois Victorian marital expectations: "The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it." Contemporary readers are likely to see the impossibly pompous, pedantic and self-deluded pseudo-scholar Edward Casaubon, whom Dorothea marries, as a caricature lacking even the subtlety of the elderly professor in Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," another pedant with a young, beautiful and unhappy wife. But Dorothea is seduced by a kind of innocent self-aggrandizement in her decision to marry the scholar bent on solving "The Key to All Mythologies." Poor Casaubon! Eliot is unsparing of his pretensions, though his quixotic project resembles, at least superficially, James Frazer's "The Golden Bough." And contemporary readers are likely to feel, as feminists like Kate Millett have observed, that Dorothea is a flawed heroine in that she chooses marriage - and then remarriage - in place of a courageously ambitious life of her own or one that approximates the life of her creator. It's as if Eliot didn't dare, for all Dorothea's superiority, to end "Middlemarch" in a region beyond the "marriage plot" - the formulaic conclusion to conventional romances Eliot derided in her essay "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists." Mead notes the conjoining of comedy and pathos in Eliot's compromised world, in which the novelist "makes Middlemarchers of us all." Distilled from numerous biographies of Eliot, including Rosemary Ashton's "George Eliot: A Life" and Rosemarie Bodenheimer's "The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction," Mead's bookis enhanced by firsthand reports of travels to places where Eliot lived and worked, and suffused throughout with enormous sympathy for her subject. "My Life in Middlemarch" is an exemplary introduction to the work of George Eliot and a helpful and informed companion guide to "Middlemarch." Its origins in what is suggested as a personal crisis on the author's part - "I wanted to recover the sense of intellectual and emotional immersion in books that I had known as a younger reader, before my attention was fractured by the exigencies of being a journalist" - connect with the perceived "natural history of yearning" Mead sees in Eliot's work. Mead's curiosity about the ill-fated friendship of George Eliot and Herbert Spencer, the historical origins of the mismatched Dorothea and Edward Casaubon and the relationship between Eliot and the infatuated Scots "fan" Alexander Main (who talked her into allowing him to edit the cloyingly titled "Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, in Prose and Verse, Selected From the Works of George Eliot") provide emotional ballast. Of the gushingly enthusiastic letters Eliot received from young women, Mead says reprovingly: "Such an approach to fiction - where do I see myself in here? - is not how a scholar reads, and it can be limiting in its solipsism." MEAD IS SO reverent about her magisterial subject, and Eliot so solemn about the duties of the novelist to "enlarge sympathies" in her readers, that it's a welcome surprise when the young Henry James arrives on the London scene to brashly proclaim Eliot as "magnificently ugly - deliciously hideous. She has a low forehead, a dull gray eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth, full of uneven teeth and a chin and jawbone qui n'en finissent pas." Yet this first, crude impression is soon amended: "Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her.... Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking." That the 26-year-old Henry James was capable of such rhapsodic praise comes as something of a surprise for many of us, more familiar with the older, rather more circumlocutious Master. The most evocative passages in "My Life in Middlemarch" are those in which Mead hints at parallels between Eliot's domestic life as a loving stepmother (to the sons of her longtime companion, the critic George Henry Lewes) and her own marriage to a man with children from a previous marriage: "From where I stand in the middle of my own home epic - my own mundane, grand domestic adventure, in which I attempt to live in sympathy with the family I have made - I now look upon the accomplishment of early-dawning, long-lasting love with something like awe." Not youthful romance but mature, abiding love amid the life of the everyday is, as Mead sees it, Eliot's great subject. "Middlemarch" gives Mead's parents (who were married for nearly 60 years) "back to me." "My Life in Middlemarch" is a poignant testimony to the abiding power of fiction: "I have grown up with George Eliot. I think 'Middlemarch' has disciplined my character. I know it has become part of my own experience and my own endurance. 'Middlemarch' inspired me when I was young, and chafing to leave home; and now, in middle life, it suggests to me what else home might mean, beyond a place to grow up and grow out of." Yet it will strike some readers as debatable that Eliot is, as Mead states, "the great artist of disappointment." Rather more, Eliot strikes us as the great artist of bourgeois accommodation and compromise. Admirable and endearing as "My Life in Middlemarch" is, there are virtually no surprises here that have not been uncovered by Eliot biographers. As Eliot's worldview seems, for many readers, to confirm some approximation of their own, so too does "My Life in Middlemarch" confirm the general, uncontested view of this great writer. There is something self-limiting if not solipsistic about focusing so narrowly on a single novel through the course of one's life, as if there were not countless other, perhaps more unsettling, more original, more turbulent, more astonishing, more aesthetically exciting and more intellectually challenging novels - James Joyce's "Ulysses," to name one; Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment," to name another. Does George Eliot, wonderful as she is, and certainly comforting in the unwavering sanity of her narrating voice, stir us to an awareness of the actual world with any of the authority of Franz Kafka? Isn't there a radiantly gifted Charles Dickens who transcends any of his Victorian contemporaries, including Eliot? Are not the radically experimental novels of Virginia Woolf more exciting, simply as aesthetic experiences? Like her genteel predecessor Jane Austen, George Eliot gives the impression of being utterly oblivious to the physical, physiological, sexual lives of women; far more insightful in the relations of the sexes is Thomas Hardy, not to mention the sexual iconoclast D. H. Lawrence. Eliot is a novelist to place not above but among these, in the extraordinary richness of 19thand early-20th-century fiction. Eliot's 'inspiring principle,' as Mead puts it, is to 'gladden and chasten human hearts.' JOYCE CAROL OATES'S most recent novel, "Carthage," has just been published.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 26, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* When Mead first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, a masterwork of sympathetic philosophy, as a young woman in an English seaside town, it became her polestar. A New Yorker staff writer and author of One Perfect Day (2007), Mead now explains why in this heady blend of memoir, biography, and literary criticism. She performs an exhilarating, often surprising close reading of the novel, which Eliot began writing at age 51 in 1870. And she takes a fresh look at Eliot's daringly unconventional life, visiting the writer's homes and casting light not only on the author's off-the-charts intellect but also her valor in forthrightly addressing complex moral issues, cutting sense of humor, large, perceptive generosity, and the deep love she shared with critic and writer George Henry Lewes and his sons. Mead injects just enough of her own life story to take measure of the profound resonance of Eliot's progressive, humanistic viewpoint, recognition of the heroism of ordinary lives, and crucial central theme, a young woman's desire for a substantial, rewarding, meaningful life. Mead's rekindling of appreciation for Eliot and her books blossoms into a celebration of the entire enterprise of writing and reading, of how literature transforms our lives as it guides us toward embracing all that might be gained from opening one's heart wider. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this deeply satisfying hybrid work of literary criticism, biography, and memoir, New Yorker staff writer Mead (One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding) brings to vivid life the profound engagement that she and all devoted readers experience with a favorite novel over a lifetime. Her love affair with Middlemarch and its author, George Eliot, began when 17-year-old Mead was growing up in southwest England. Here, she wants to "go back to being a reader," and sets out to rediscover Eliot, visiting the places Eliot lived, studying her letters, and even holding a journal in Eliot's own handwriting. In Mead's rendering, Eliot proves a deeply loving partner and devoted stepmother. Mead's considerable scholarship is accessible and revelatory to anyone who cares about what Eliot calls "the common yearning of womanhood." Mead, who identifies strongly with aspects of Eliot's life and that of the characters in Middlemarch, returns to the novel during various stages of her life: as a young Englishwoman finding her way in New York; in relationships with difficult men; as a stepmother and wife; and eventually as the mother of a son. As Mead writes: "There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them. books that grow with the reader as the reader grows." Passionate readers, even those new to Middlemarch, will relish this book. Agent: Kathy Robbins, the Robbins Office. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In her charming bibliomemoir, Mead (One Perfect Day) illustrates the power of great literature, revealing how a lifetime of reading George Eliot's Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life has influenced, and even transformed, her life. First released in serial format in 1871, Mary Ann Evans's-Eliot was a pen name-classic tale of 19th-century English country life features a diverse cast of characters and themes. When British-born Mead first read Middlemarch as a teenager, she immediately identified with those characters, who longed to escape provincial life. As Mead read and reread Middlemarch throughout her life, she found it always had something new and relevant to say to her. verdict Rich with information about Eliot's life and work and beautifully read by Kate Reading, this title will delight Eliot enthusiasts, contemporary memoir fans, and those who enjoy "books about reading books." ["Even the reader who has never heard of George Eliot will find Mead's crisp, exacting prose absorbing and thought-provoking," read the starred review of the Crown hc, LJ 12/13.]-Beth Farrell, Cleveland State Univ. Law Lib. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A New Yorker writer examines the arc of her life in the reflection of George Eliot's Middlemarch. This subgenre--examining personal history through the echoes of a singular work of art--can be riddled with land mines. When it works well--e.g., Alan Light's The Holy and the Broken (2012)--the results can be marvelous. Obviously fleshed out from her New Yorker article "Middlemarch and Me," Mead (One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, 2007) could have simply written a dense biography of Mary Ann Evans, who would go on to write some of the most enduring novels of the Victorian era under her pen name. In fact, Mead was wise not to omit herself from this story, as her feelings about the great work and its themes of women's roles, relationships and self-delusion are far more insightful than a barrage of facts would have been. Mead discovered the book at 17, a critical time when the character of Dorothea Brooke, the aspirational protagonist forced to subjugate her dreams, truly spoke to her. In some ways, it's easy to see how Mead's life has paralleled these fictional characters she so admires, even as she repeats some of the same mistakes. It's difficult not to admire the sense of wonder that she continues to find in the pages of a novel more than a century old. "It demands that we enter into the perspective of other struggling, erring humans--and recognize that we, too, will sometimes be struggling, and may sometimes be erring, even when we are at our most arrogant and confident," Mead writes. "And this is why every time I go back to the novel I feel that--while I might live a century without knowing as much as just a handful of its pages suggest--I may hope to be enlarged by each revisiting." A rare and remarkable fusion of techniques that draws two women together across time and space.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
