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Feb 18, 2018Brontina66 rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
This book is about George Eliot and her masterpiece as much as it is about the author's personal life. It is a journey through time and space. We read about Rebecca Mead's experiences as a child, a teenager, and an adult woman, married with children, in the different places where she lived. We also read about Eliot and her life, the experiences that led her to write "Middlemarch" and to write it in that particular way. The writer, a journalist and not a novelist, describes how the different re-readings of the novel helped her to understand her own life and to form the values that inform that life. What I found interesting was that "Middlemarch" revealed to her different aspects and new insights every time she read it, in various stages of her life. It is a cliche that great books are such because they help understand and discover ourselves with each new reading, but in this case I must say that it is true - at least for the writer. I also liked that Mead actually visited the places where Eliot lived and wrote. I have just come back from a trip to England that included Nuneaton and Griff House, so the book resonated even more with me because of this shared experience. Overall it is a good book, written from a personal point of view that of course cannot be shared by every single reader. It is informative and well researched, and I really hope that it will inspire its readers to read (or re-read) "Middlemarch."