The Road to Middlemarch

What would happen if I stopped to consider how Middlemarch has shaped my understanding of my own life? Why did the novel still feel so urgent, after all these years? And what could it give me now, as I paused here in the middle of things, and surveyed where I had come from, and thought about where I was, and wondered where I might go next?

At the age of 17, Rebecca Mead read Middlemarch for the first time, and has read it again every five years since, interpreting and discovering it anew each time. In The Road to Middlemarch she writes passionately about her relationship with this remarkable Victorian novel - loved by so many - and explores how its characters and their stories, along with George Eliot's own life experiences, can answer some of our fundamental questions about life and love.

Middlemarch has at its centre one of literature's most compelling and ill-fated marriages, and some of the most tenderly drawn characters. Mead explores how Middlemarch teaches us to be grown-ups, and to value our ordinary lives. The Road to Middlemarch is a sensitive work of deep reading and biography, for every reader of literature who cares about why we read books and how they read us.

Rebecca Mead is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Born and educated in England, she left for the States in her twenties. She has written for many newspapers and magazines and is the author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. She lives in Brooklyn.

'A perfectly composed offering of literary love and self-observation. I adored it.' Elizabeth Gilbert

'A wise, humane and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English.' Harold Bloom