My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

(Crown, $25)

“I owe a debt of gratitude to Rebecca Mead,” said Kathryn Schulz in New York magazine. Reading her tribute to Middlemarch and to the influence that the book has had on her life, I felt compelled to reacquaint myself with the novel’s greatness. George Eliot’s 1874 masterwork remains the “most humane,” “most morally serious” novel ever produced in English. Eliot wrote under a pseudonym because she feared having her books filed alongside the “silly lady novels” she despised, yet her great gift was her bottomless capacity for empathy. Middlemarch is about a young woman trapped in a bad marriage, but it’s also a knife-sharp delineation of life in a small town. Step into the 1830 burg Eliot created and you’ll recognize every person in it. “I am not sure any other writer has ever captured with such precision what it is like to be a member of our species.”

Mead keeps her own claims for Middlemarch modest, said Alexander Nazaryan in Newsweek. She doesn’t argue that it changed the world, only that it offered her 17-year-old self a way of seeing. But by speaking about her own life and finding parallels with the story in the novel she’s returned to again and again, Mead has created an “artful nesting doll of a book” that helps us find ourselves in the pages of both works. As committed as Eliot was to seeing life through the eyes of others, Middlemarch flatters no one. Instead, “it renders huge the smallness of the individual,” reminding us that no matter our pasts or prospects, we are all struggling, error-prone provincials of one kind or another.

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The Eliot worship can become a bit much, said Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Times. Mead stays so steadfastly reverent about her subject that “it’s a welcome surprise” when a young Henry James pops up to proclaim Eliot “deliciously hideous” and a “great horse-faced bluestocking.” As “admirable and endearing as My Life in Middlemarch is,” it goes too far when it implies that all the world’s wisdom can be found in Eliot’s novel. Read Dostoyevsky and Joyce and Kafka and Woolf and tell me that one great writer is all that any of us needs.