The Nature of Things

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead My rating: 4 of 5 stars Having recently read Middlemarch for the first time and having loved the experience, I was intrigued by this title. I remembered having read a couple of positive reviews of the book when it first came out over a year ago and I decided that now was the time for me to read it, while Middlemarch is still fresh in my mind. Rebecca Mead, a writer for The New Yorker , first read the book when she was seventeen. She has reread it numerous times in the decades since then and feels a strong connection with it. She sees connections between the text and her own life and between George Eliot's life and hers. This book is an exploration of all those connections. It is part biography of Eliot, part autobiography, part literary criticism and memoir of how the book came to be written. Some critics described it as a bibliomemoir and that seems apt. I actually felt the title proved to be a bit misleading. The book was more about Eliot...