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My Life In Middlemarch (2014)

by Rebecca Mead(Favorite Author)

3.56 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0307984761 (ISBN13: 9780307984760)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Crown

review 1: This title was popping up on recommendations, so I decided I needed to read _Middlemarch_. I was put off by _The Mill on the Floss_ in college & hadn't read any George Eliot since, but I got Middlemarch on audio & let it play. After that rather long but very worthwhile project, this book did a lot to solidify a character (Dorothea) whom I found to be far ahead of her time, and illuminated the life of an author even more ahead of her time. Perversely, I was gratified to hear that George Eliot, aka Mary Anne Evans, was considered an outright Ugly Woman & also lived her most fulfilling years during middle age.
review 2: The stated core of this book is its examination of how Mead's appreciation of Middlemarch -- and her identification with its different characters... more and situations -- has evolved over the course of her life since reading it as a schoolgirl. Sometimes these observations resonate, as when she muses that, while everyone starts out identifying with Dorothea, anyone who is a scholar or an author ultimately recognizes some kinship with Casaubon. There is also a less successful component describing Mead's visits to the various sites of George Eliot's life and writing, which mostly involve unsurprising observations on the transformation of the settings since her time. In the end, I most enjoyed Mead's reflections on George Eliot's life and attitudes. Her conviction that informed empathy could form the foundation for a practical ethic that would obviate the need for Christian faith -- which she lost in her young adulthood -- permeates Middlemarch, and I'd never realized the extent to which the book's compassionate depiction of its characters' hopes and failings reflected a life philosophy rather than simply a novelistic technique. I read Mead's book immediately before Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams, and it was an unexpectedly happy juxtaposition of very different approaches to empathy. less

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