My Life in Middlemarch

My Life in Middlemarch
Author: Rebecca Mead
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2014-01-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307984788

A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories. 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. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. 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. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.

Middlemarch

Middlemarch
Author: George Eliot
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 802
Release: 2015-11-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0698408411

On April 10, 1994, PBS stations nationwide will air the first episode of a lavish six-part Masterpiece Theatre production of Eliot's brilliant work, Middlemarch, hosted by Russell Baker and produced by Louis Marks. The Modern Library is pleased to offer this official companion edition, complete with tie-in art and printed on acid-free paper. Unabridged.

Middlemarch

Middlemarch
Author: George Elliott
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2009-03-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1425040527

An extraordinary masterpiece written from personal experience, Middlemarch is a deep psychological observation of human nature that revolves around the issues of love, jealousy, and obligation. Eliot's feminist views are apparent through the novel: she stresses the fact that women should control their own lives.

Home/Land

Home/Land
Author: Rebecca Mead
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2023-07-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0593081242

A moving reflection on the complicated nature of home and homeland, and the heartache and adventure of leaving an adopted country in order to return to your native land—this is a “winsome memoir of departure and reversal . . . about the way a series of unknowns accrue into a life” (Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror). When the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead relocated to her birth city, London, with her family in the summer of 2018, she was both fleeing the political situation in America and seeking to expose her son to a wider world. With a keen sense of what she’d given up as she left New York, her home of thirty years, she tried to knit herself into the fabric of a changed London. The move raised poignant questions about place: What does it mean to leave the place you have adopted as home and country? And what is the value and cost of uprooting yourself? In a deft mix of memoir and reportage, drawing on literature and art, recent and ancient history, and the experience of encounters with individuals, environments, and landscapes in New York City and in England, Mead artfully explores themes of identity, nationality, and inheritance. She recounts her time in the coastal town of Weymouth, where she grew up; her dizzying first years in New York where she broke into journalism; the rich process of establishing a new home for her dual-national son in London. Along the way, she gradually reckons with the complex legacy of her parents. Home/Land is a stirring inquiry into how to be present where we are, while never forgetting where we have been.

One Perfect Day

One Perfect Day
Author: Rebecca Mead
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2008-07-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1440634025

Astutely observed and deftly witty, One Perfect Day masterfully mixes investigative journalism and social commentary to explore the workings of the wedding industry-an industry that claims to be worth $160 billion to the U.S. economy and which has every interest in ensuring that the American wedding becomes ever more lavish and complex. Taking us inside the workings of the wedding industry-including the swelling ranks of professional event planners, department stores with their online registries, the retailers and manufacturers of bridal gowns, and the Walt Disney Company and its Fairy Tale Weddings program-New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead skillfully holds the mirror up to the bride's deepest hopes and fears about her wedding day, revealing that for better or worse, the way we marry is who we are.

Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
Author: Michael Gorra
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2012-08-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0871403285

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography) One of the Best Books of 2012: The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews, Boston Phoenix A revelatory biography of the American master as told through the lens of his greatest novel. Henry James (1843–1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James’s masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel—the scandalous story of the expatriate American heiress Isabel Archer—came to be written in the first place. Traveling to Florence, Rome, Paris, and England, Gorra sheds new light on James’s family, the European literary circles—George Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev—in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create this most memorable of female protagonists. Appealing to readers of Menand’s The Metaphysical Club and McCullough’s The Greater Journey, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written. It becomes a piercing detective story on its own.

Middlemarch Book II

Middlemarch Book II
Author: George Eliot
Publisher:
Total Pages: 139
Release: 2020-06-12
Genre:
ISBN:

Book II of George Eliot's classic novel of English provincial life.

Changing My Mind

Changing My Mind
Author: Zadie Smith
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2009-11-12
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1101151463

"[These essays] reflect a lively, unselfconscious, rigorous, erudite, and earnestly open mind that's busy refining its view of life, literature, and a great deal in between." —Los Angeles Times Split into five sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering--Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians and Italian divas. Whether writing on Katherine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani, or Zora Neale Hurston, she brings deft care to the art of criticism with a style both sympathetic and insightful. Changing My Mind is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent, and funny--a gift to readers and writers both.

Middlemarch

Middlemarch
Author: George Eliot
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Leatherbound Classics
Total Pages: 704
Release: 2019-08-27
Genre: Great Britain
ISBN: 9781435169579

Subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, George Eliot's novel Middlemarch is a chronicle of the titularnineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of political and socialchange. Eliot explores the upheaval and transformation brought about bythese changes through their impact on the lives of a richly varied cast ofcharacters that includes the pious young Dorothea Brooke, her suitor theReverend Edward Casaubon, the ambitious doctor Tertius Lydgate, and themysterious schemer John Raffles.

Gems from George Eliot

Gems from George Eliot
Author: George Eliot
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 40
Release: 2017-01-05
Genre:
ISBN: 9781542378314

Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of which are set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure that her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women writing only lighthearted romances. She also wished to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic.