Middlemarch: the novel that reads you

The genesis of The Road to Middlemarch was a fine article in the New Yorker about  Rebecca Mead’s unsuccessful search for the origin of the remark, sometimes attributed to George Eliot, that ‘it’s never too late to become the person you might have been’. To Mead this seemed at variance with the concentration in Middlemarch on ‘the melancholy acknowledgment of limitation’. She sets her vain attempt to re-attribute that sentence in apposition to Eliot’s story of  Lydgate, the doctor whose scientific ambitions are dashed in the wake of his marriage to the implacable Rosamond Vincy: ‘I had aspired to make a link in the chain of discovery, and had failed.’ Mead’s project is to ask how her own life story informs her evolving response to Middlemarch. This entails thinking about George Eliot’s life in relation to Middlemarch, and the meaning of both for Mead. In brief, she sets out to show that ‘the book was reading me as I was reading it.