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.’

Her own book is loosely structured around the eight sections of Middlemarch. Zadie Smith has described Eliot’s method of interweaving the many narrative strands in her novel as ‘a riot of subjectivity’: each new viewpoint utterly involves and convinces the captive reader. The arc of Mead’s argument is to demonstrate how the Middlemarch of Dorothea and Lydgate, which first fired her schoolgirl imagination with dreams of escape and intellectual ambition, is also, years later, the Middlemarch of her late onset absorption in the love story of Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, that speaks of the importance of childhood landscape and the need to love ‘something of where one comes from — and have emotional access to that love’. Mead, as a girl, longed to escape her provincial background, and after Oxford she left England for New York, where she still lives.