The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot

Rebecca Mead, The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot (Text Publishing Company, 2014)To do justice to The Road to Middlemarch one needs to consider it alongside the novel itself, because the novel is firmly entrenched within the book, together with Mead's own response to the work of George Eliot and the life of Eliot herself. Middlemarch by George Eliot has been described as the best novel in English. This is a strong claim, and one with which I could not agree, but there is certainly a stronger case to be made for Middlemarch being judged the best Victorian novel. I first read it many years ago as an undergraduate at Melbourne University. I reread it years later when studying Victorian Literature as part of a Masters at Flinders University. It was not set as a text in this course because the lecturer deemed that students would not take the time to read such a long book, and I suspect that this is correct. This reluctance to undertake a demanding novel is to be deplored, as students were denied the opportunity to study a fine work. Rebecca Mead, on the other hand, has no reservations as to the length of Middlemarch and has read this novel at least once every five years, beginning at the age of seventeen. It made an immediate impact then: 'I loved Middlemarch and I loved being the kind of person who loved it. It gratified my aspirations to maturity and learnedness' (6). Over the many years since, Mead's appreciation of Middlemarch has not waned, but it has developed and changed.And as I continue to read and think and reflect I also realize that she [Eliot] has given me something else: a profound experience with a book, over time, that amounts to one of the frictions of my life. I have grown up with George Eliot. I think Middlemarch has disciplined my character. (266)Has Mead succeeded in bringing readers into the same sense of involvement with the work of George Eliot and particularly Middlemarch as she has experienced? I can only speak for one reader, and I was inspired to return to the novel and read it for the third time. Mead has certainly provided not only insights into Middlemarch itself, but into the life and social period when Eliot was writing, as well as reflections on some of her other novels and essays. The book is part literary criticism, part literary biography, part memoir, all of which combine to make a very satisfying text. Apart from her undoubted enthusiasm for Eliot, Mead has embarked on very extensive research. Drawing on her experience as a journalist, she set out to 'look at something familiar from an unfamiliar angle.' She asked herself: 'What if I tried to discern the ways in which George Eliot's life shaped her fiction and how her fiction shaped her?' (9) Middlemarch was originally published in serial form, which would have implications concerning its length and narrative structure. The story is complex in its exploration of relationships, the wider influences of the morality and political happenings of the day. Eliot has no qualms about stepping into the novel to speak directly to her readers; a device which Mead agrees can be awkward and off-putting, although more accepted at the time than it would be today. …