So… George Eliot is my person. I love her. She gets me. Her books are really good. The way most Goodreads people seem to feel about Virginia Woolf, is how I feel about George Eliot. I like her so much that I even like the things that, when you read enough tellings of them, are annoying or dumb or snotty or flawed. I like them all. This is going to skew everything I ever read about her and her novels, so there is my disclaimer.

I've looked forward to reading this book for a long time, you guys!

This book goes straight for me: George Eliot is important to Rebecca Mead, too, and she is reflecting on that personal significance by discussing the themes and history of her favorite Eliot novel. This is 100% something I would love to do, too! I have tons to say about what role my favorite Eliot book has had in my life, how connected I feel to the events of Eliot's personal life while she wrote it, and how I foresee its significance maturing as my life moves along. Very likely most of us could do this, with some book or other. Rebecca Mead just comes very close to mine.

(FWIW, "my" book is The Mill on the Floss — my horrible inadequate review — and I think about it all the time. When I see a copy, I play the "open to a random page" game and then stop before I claw my face right off, it's so emotional to me. A little codependent tradition we've got.)

Personally, I like Middlemarch fine, though its general adulation occasionally makes me wonder if it's maybe the only Eliot that those people ever read. I haven't read everything yet either, so what do I know, but I like at least two others better. But hey, that's okay. It teaches me what I like in books. It teaches me what "Literature" likes in books. And most validly of all, Rebecca Mead is here telling me what she likes in books.

Her telling, here, isn't actually supremely specific to Middlemarch. A reader could conclude many of these things with many other books. But you know what? Doesn't matter. For her, this is the book, the one through which she can filter everything in her world. Isn't that awesome? It is awesome. I love that.

However: after finishing, I'm not surprised by the reviewers who think Mead's book is a little bit mislabeled. While it does everything it says it will in the description, it should really be noted how emphasized Eliot's biography is as a subject, and how much space it's given here. Most chapters, rather than being structured around Middlemarch or Mead's personal thoughts, are actually structured around a telling of Eliot's life that is enhanced by those other things. This surprised me, because biography is well-covered ground, and a big responsibility to deliver to new readers. And then in writing a personal book, as Mead is, glossing over the bits of Eliot's life that she's less interested in analyzing is not a very balanced approach. I did a healthy amount of biographical reading for a thesis only last year, so I've still got a decent grasp on the main narrative of Eliot's life. If it were up to me, I would make some different choices than Mead does of what to include and what to say about it, pertaining to parts of her novels. But again, I can't fault her for not writing "my" book, because she's writing hers.

Clearly, Mead definitely knows more than me, and I was reading several things for the first time, or that were told here in a way I finally took note of. She particularly spends a lot of time on Eliot's partner Lewes's sons, including some revealing letters by Thornie Lewes that haven't been published before. They're not completely on-topic, but it's a fun section in a face-palmy way. (RIYL Victorian racism, and comparisons of shooting "bushmen" to hunting "chimps and gorillas." Kids those days!) I also really enjoyed the chapter about Eliot's Oxford friends (Mark Pattison and Emily Strong), by whom it was/is widely conjectured that Middlemarch's Dorothea and Casaubon were inspired. Whether or not this theory is true or makes good sense, Mead writes a really entertaining analysis of their true story and I loved learning about them.

The thing I loved most, though, and the most original thing that Mead does in the book (and unsurprisingly, something I would LOVE to do!), is to go and make pilgrimage to as many of Eliot's landmarks as she can. All of her homes, all of the areas that influenced her writing during the Middlemarch period, Mead hops around and stares them all down. This is the perfect connective tool for this book: it fits a telling of both Eliot's life story as well as Mead's own, and has the built-in perspective of centuries. How do places and things — books, artifacts — reach us over time? Do they lose or gain value? Can they do both?

I love visiting historic sites for this reason (especially old homes), so I was extremely excited to see what Mead would find. Eliot's childhood home is a pub (the house still stands), her young adult home is a graffitied Bangladeshi community center (the house still stands), but the home she shared with Lewes for fifteen years ("The Priory") is a train track. And Mead goes to see it. I would go to see it, too! I might, if I go to London. It's worth it to me, the place. The place has value. When Mead goes to them, she speaks to people there, she looks inside, she asks to see the special rooms. It's worth it to her, too.

She also takes some wonderful research opportunities, like reviewing Eliot's notebooks and Middlemarch's original manuscript at their special library collections. And because this is Mead's book, about her own experience as a lover of this great novel, she gets to tell us how that feels, in addition to what's in them. How does the notebook smell, for heaven's sake? (LIKE A FIREPLACE!) This type of legit research experience, together with the everyday experiences of museum visits and the more personal visits she goes out of her way to do (she visits Lewes's living descendants! SHE HOLDS ELIOT'S PEN!), combine into a very trustworthy and relatable narrative experience.

More of Mead's own memoir would have enhanced this book for me. She mentions her life events a lot, but hangs on to a good amount of her journalism-trained reserve, and so does not go very deep. Probably the only thing I like more than a person talking about their favorite book is a person speaking deeply about their lives, so if there were a little more of both of those in this book I can't imagine how incredibly much more I would love it, too.

Partly, I feel that I myself am seeking a leader, someone who can write to me about life and George Eliot and how to read and connect. I'm so grateful that this book exists in order to take a step and go there.