My Life in Middlemarch
About this audiobook
A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth—Middlemarch—and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories.
Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage, and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.
In this wise and revealing work of biography, reportage, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece—the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure—and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of the author herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.
About the author
Rebecca Mead is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.
Kate Reading is an Audie Award–winning narrator and has received numerous Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine. Her narration has been recognized as Reader of the Year by Publishers Weekly, and by Booklist’s 2019 Top of the List, for the American Library Association. She and her husband, narrator Michael Kramer, record at their home studio in Maryland, Madison Productions. Learn more at KateReadingAudioBooks.com.
