Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900

Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’, offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written.