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.

Written when Eliot was 51, Middlemarch has at its centre one of literature's most compelling and ill-fated marriages, and some of the most tenderly drawn characters—their most intimate struggles, their ambitions, dreams, and attachments.

Mead interweaves her own reflections on adolescence, relationships, and marriage to explore how Middlemarch teaches us to be grown-ups, and to value the limitations of 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.