Update: I read this book again 10 years later and was very unsatisfied due to different expectations for it. I had re-read Middlemarch and picked this up again wanting to be transported into someone else's reading experience of it only to be met with hard, cold, facts about the author's life. I found it rather dry and updated my review from 5 to 1 stars to remind myself not to read it again. What a difference a decade makes.

A bibliomemoir about the effects of reading a classic on one's life. An enjoyable way to learning more about George Eliot who began Middlemarch at age 51, her contemporaries, her meliorist philosophy ("The conviction that, through the small, beneficent actions and intentions of individuals, the world might gradually grow to be a better place.) and how she worked on and revised her work. Insightful how her relationship with George Henry Lewes ("They read widely, wrote copiously, talked endlessly.") affected her fiction and hearing how an earlier line of Middlemarch compared with the revision.

My quandary now: Which Eliot to read next: The Mill on the Floss, Silas Mariner, Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda? Or re-read Middlemarch instead?

Quotable from Middlemarch
"That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil -- widening the skirts of lights and making the struggle with darkness narrower."

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Quotable from My Life in Middlemarch:
"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."

"Her best work began in being beloved, while middle age granted her an expansion rather than a diminishment of possibility."

"Her aspiration was not for literary immortality — although she got that — but for a kind of encompassing empathy that would make the punishing experience of egoism shrink and dwindle. She believed that growth depends upon complex connections and openness to others, and does not derive from a solitary swelling of the self. She became great because she recognized that she was small."

A lovely meditation on the relationship between a reader and her favorite novel and on the connection between the life of an author and her works. Beautifully written--and it has made me want to revisit "Middlemarch", a novel I liked but did not love when I first read it but which I feel more connected to now having read "My Life in Middlemarch".

I haven't read Middlemarch (yet), so perhaps I'm not a typical reader. I connected with this book because I know how one book can become a treasured companion throughout a person's life. I want to read some George Eliot now. I give this book three stars because I did find that it meandered a bit too slowly at times. This may be because I haven't read Middlemarch. All the same, I probably won't re-read.

What a delightful book! It's difficult to classify it as it's part memoir, part literary criticism, part biography, part ode to a great 19th century novel. But as one of the only people in my Critical Writing class who appreciated Eliot's novel when we read it, I thoroughly enjoyed Mead's book. Admittedly this book would not appeal to anyone uninterested or unimpressed with George Eliot, but for those who are it's quite a treat.

True confessions: I own a copy of Middlemarch, and I think I read the entire thing -- it's a friend's favorite book, and I read it because of her -- but I don't remember the plot or anything else, really, about the book. So there's no real reason why I should have started or kept at this book, except that I read a New Yorker essay that Mead wrote about the pandemic, and one link led to another, until I was borrowing the eBook version of this from the library.

This was a light and easy way for me to learn more about George Eliot. The fairly random musings of this book -- about everything from Victorian mindsets to Mead's private life -- fit my current attention span. Mead describes locations in the U.K. well, and I had planned to travel to England and Scotland this summer, so I appreciated those literary excursions. I'm not sure any of Mead's claims about Middlemarch or Eliot necessarily hold up to scholarly scrutiny, but I was engaged with them. Do children experience emotions more intensely than adults? Does the landscape of a person's childhood have power because it's "where we learned to be human"? Can literature teach us empathy for all people? And, to Mead's wider point, does every reader have a touchstone book that matters most to them? I can't say that I do, but I wish that I did. Maybe.

I started reading this book in tandem with Middlemarch, but I had to slow it down because the book does describe plot development in Eliot's novel and I wanted to avoid spoilers. I truly enjoyed the book for its biographical history of Eliot's life before, during, and after the publication of Middlemarch. I'm still intrigued by Eliot's life, as many others have been. Apparently there are something like 38 biographies about her life!

I bypassed this a couple of times at the library as I have never read "Middlemarch", but then I cheated and watched the BBC miniseries, which was swell. So I thought I could give this a go. I was expecting that a book about how a much-loved-much reread novel has affected one's life would be, well, a lot more fun than this was. Humorous, even. Nope. This was, well, I'm not really sure. A mini-biography of George Eliot, rather dryly written, some Cliff Notes-y stuff about the novel itself, and once in a while a bit about herself which never amounted to much more than an outline....I would think from the premise that you would really feel like you knew her after reading this, but I don't at all. Her descriptions of traveling in Eliot's footsteps should have been a lot more interesting then they were, but her writing style is just so....lacking in sparkle? that the whole thing ended up being a bit of a slog. I knew very little about George Eliot and I did learn from this, so I don't regret reading it, but I am not going to urge it on anyone, either. (I did order "Middlemarch" from B & N yesterday....)

An enjoyable look at how George Eliot’s personal life influenced her fiction, especially Middlemarch, as well as how that book has impacted the author. Obviously contains spoilers for all of Middlemarch, but also contains a brief spoiler to the end of The Mill on the Floss on p. 207—skip the middle paragraph beginning with “My own inclination...”

I'm going to read Middle March for a book club in February. I read it before and loved it, but it was 15-20 years ago. Should I read Mead's book before or after I re-read it..?

First of all, it has to be said that you should have recently read (or re-read) Middlemarch before approaching this one. This book is only partly a personal memoir — which was what I was anticipating — and more like an extended textual and thematic analysis. It's very thorough and has some good insights and anecdotes, but feels like a travelogue at times. I don't feel as if I know either George Sand or the author much better at the end.