The Road to Middlemarch grew from a 2011 article Mead wrote for the New Yorker. Its title, ‘Middlemarch and Me: What George Eliot Teaches Us’, suggests bibliotherapy, or literary self-help, where the lessons contained within a great novel can be applied to life today. In The Novel Cure: An A–Z of Literary Remedies (2013), Middlemarch is included as a helpful book if one is confronted with the problem of ‘Mr/Mrs Wrong, Ending Up With’. Thankfully, Mead’s work has more to offer than counsel on marital disharmony. The Road to Middlemarch is a nuanced, wide-ranging account of Mead’s long relationship with the novel, and the ways in which it has reflected and influenced her life.

As a teenager living in provincial England, Mead first read Middlemarch and fell for its earnest evocation of youthful yearning. She enjoyed the version of herself it reflected: ‘I loved Middlemarch, and I loved being the kind of person who loved it. It gratified my aspiration to maturity and learnedness.’ From the outset, Mead shows a fierce loyalty towards the woman who would become George Eliot. Acknowledging the almost universal disdain for the early letters of Mary Ann Evans, Mead defends their context alongside her own attempts at teenage letter writing: ‘They were written out of passion and exuberance and boredom and ostentation.’ Like Eliot, Mead knows that ‘[w]riting letters was one of the things there was to do while I was waiting for my life to start’. Mead’s life did start, as a literature student at Oxford, through several relationships of varying longevity, and through her move to New York City and her work as a journalist. Middlemarch was the ‘one book [she] never stopped reading’. By her early forties, Mead’s life experience had recalibrated her impression of the novel. She now appreciated its subtle humour, overlooked when she was young and desperate to be taken seriously. She had a newfound respect for the wisdom of Mary Garth, and she recognised the breadth of experience Middlemarch contained. Beyond the concerns of youth, Middlemarch ‘now seemed to offer a melancholy dissection of the resignations that attend middle age, the paths untrodden and the choices unmade’.

George Eliot
(artist unknown)

Middlemarch encompasses all of this. It is a book about youth and middle age (old age too), marriage and friendship (and their occasional blessed intersection), and the ‘limits of commitment’ to community, oneself, and others. Mead asserts that the ‘necessity of growing out of … self-centredness is the theme of Middlemarch’, a fine summary that holds up as well as many other alternative readings. In writing about Middlemarch, Mead unapologetically takes ownership of a piece of literature that has been analysed and appraised since its creation.

Mead covers the most well-known aspects of the novel and its author: Virginia Woolf’s oft-quoted declaration that Middlemarch is ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’; Henry James’s opinion of Eliot as ‘magnificently ugly, deliciously hideous’; Eliot’s unconventional relationship with George Henry Lewes; the dispute around the identity of the real-life models for Dorothea and Casaubon; and the biographical quandary of Eliot’s young groom, John Walter Cross, falling into a Venetian canal on their honeymoon. This final episode is given short shrift here; Mead refuses to instil it with the meaning it has been accorded by many Eliot biographers. Instead, she lets ‘the event stand in its singular, perplexing strangeness, one episode in Eliot’s life, but not its defining one’.

Mead emphasises Eliot’s extraordinary capacity for literary sympathy, believing that ‘[g]enerating the experience of sympathy was what her fiction was for’. Mead extends her own sympathies to an array of characters in Eliot’s life and work. Victorianists will enjoy the presence of Barbara Bodichon, Herbert Spencer, and the perpetually appalled Eliza Lynn Linton. Eliot’s relationship with her stepsons is beautifully rendered and linked to Mead’s own marriage in her mid-thirties to a man with three sons; Mead explores the tricky terrain of inherited motherhood and the unexpected revelations of being, in Eliot’s words, ‘up to my ears in Boydom’. Mead is even generous towards Alexander Main, an obsessive Eliot fan who edited Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse, Selected from the Works of George Eliot (1872). This inherently reductive offering, combined with Main’s ‘almost stalker-life’ devotion to Eliot, is abhorrent to Mead. Yet she reads his letters, tells his story with compassion and recognises ‘an awkward fellowship with him’ as another impassioned Eliot admirer. (Given Mead’s disdain for the decontextualised quotation, it is interesting to consider what she thinks of the ‘accessible’ cover design for The Road to Middlemarch, with its series of pithy bookish phrases in pretty frames.)

Published in the United States as My Life in Middlemarch, the revised title of Mead’s book emphasises the abundance of metaphorical and literal journeys it contains. There is the requisite literary tourism: the author’s birthplace; the pub that may or may not be the one in the novel; the encounter with the writing desk; the regional museum displays of artefacts that may or may not have been used by the writer herself. After trips to Nuneaton and Coventry, where Eliot’s childhood homes are now defined by beer mats and pokie machines, Mead goes to the site of the Priory, the London house Eliot shared with Lewes.

[The road] terminated suddenly at an entrance to an electrical substation that lay behind a high brick wall that was topped with a wire fence. Yellow and black hazard signs were posted along the wall’s length. ‘Danger of Death,’ they read, and in that melancholy moment, as I discovered Eliot’s home not only gone but her street erased, the sign took on the aspect of a grimly humorous memento mori.

This sort of appealing self-mockery is a feature of Mead’s journeys on The Road to Middlemarch. The tone is never cloying; alongside loyalty and love, there is also critical precision. Mead is not your usual literary tourist, and her access to Eliot’s history is scholarly and privileged; her encounter with the Middlemarch manuscript at the British Library is especially well handled.

Middlemarch devotees might have certain quibbles. Mead doesn’t explore the feminist possibilities of the novel. Middlemarch’s great theme of reconciled ambition is not given its due, and there is perhaps too much of the investigative journalist’s accounting of the research process. But this reader approved of Mead’s Middlemarch and was left with a feeling of kinship. As Mead writes, sometimes ‘we find a book we love has moved another person in the same ways it has moved ourselves, and one definition of compatibility might be when two people have highlighted the same passages in their editions of a favourite novel’.