Why Marriage Is the Start of an 'Epic,' According to George Eliot
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Jonathan Franzen, Sherman Alexie, Andre Dubus III and more.
Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch is many things: a biography of the great British novelist George Eliot; a critical study of Middlemarch, her best and most famous novel; and Mead’s own memoir of growing up, then growing older, with Eliot as her touchstone.
Though this hybrid form—as Joyce Carol Oates points out—is something of an established genre, such works typically focus on a writer’s entire oeuvre (Nicholson Baker’s Updike homage, U & I), a series of classic books, or some book proposal-driven stunt (My Year of Living Biblically). It’s far rarer to take a single work—especially one written within the past 150 years—and inhabit it completely, using that work alone to map one’s entire life. Mead finds that Middlemarch deepens as her own experience does—“the novel opened up to me further every time I read it,” she writes, as though Middlemarch is not something she reads from start to finish but journeys into over time. Though she offers vivid insight into Eliot’s life and work, My Life in Middlemarch takes this kind of chronic re-reading as its explicit subject, and exploring what we might gain by reading deeply, not just broadly.
When I spoke to the author for this series, I asked her to do the impossible: choose a single favorite line from the
