Product Description [Read by Kate Reading] A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth -- Middlemarch -- and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories. Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage, and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as ''one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,'' offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reportage, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece -- the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure -- and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of the author herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us. Review ''In this deeply satisfying hybrid work of literary criticism, biography, and memoir, New Yorker staff writer Mead brings to vivid life the profound engagement that she and all devoted readers experience with a favorite novel over a lifetime . . . Passionate readers, even those new to Middlemarch, will relish this book.'' --Publishers Weekly (starred review) ''A singular and inventive tale . . . My Life in Middlemarch is a perfectly composed offering of literary love and self-observation. I adored it, and it will forever live on my bookshelf next to my own precious paperbacks of George Eliot.'' --Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love ''A wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city.'' --Harold Bloom''A wonderfully intelligent exploration of a great novel and its great author.'' --Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy ''Marvelous.'' --Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel ''My Life in Middlemarch is both unclassifiable and irresistible: a smart, absorbing glimpse into two lives -- George Eliot's and Rebecca Mead's -- as well as a lively meditation on Middlemarch. Intelligent, insightful, and generous in her judgments, Mead is a delightful guide--winsome and engaging.'' --Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.''A rare and remarkable fusion of techniques that draws two women together across time and space.'' --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) ''Even the reader who has never heard of George Eliot will find Mead's crisp, exacting prose absorbing and thought provoking.'' --Library Journal (starred review) ''[Mead] performs an exhilarating, often surprising close reading of the novel, which Eliot began writing at age fifty-one in 1870. And she takes a fresh look at Eliot's daringly unconventional life, visiting the writer's homes and casting light not only on the author's off-the-charts intellect but also her valor in forthrightly addressing complex moral issues, cutting sense of humor, 'large, perceptive generosity,' and the deep love she shared with critic and writer George Henry Lewes and his sons. Mead injects just enough of her own life story to take measure of the profound resonance of Eliot's progressive, huma
My Life in Middlemarch
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Author: Rebecca Mead
Binding: Audio CD
ISBN: 9781482973556
Details:
Author: Rebecca Mead
Brand: Blackstone Audiobooks
Edition: Unabridged
Binding: Audio CD
Format: Audiobook
Release Date: 28-01-2014
Package Dimensions: 5.7 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches Languages: English
EAN: 9781482973556
