You know how you will write in a diary how your life sucks and nothing great will ever happen. You can think you are the most boring person and you’re destined to live the same lives as your parents, because that is what you were told to do. You are never going to be the next Jane Austen, J.K. Rowling or George Elliot for that matter. You are going to be living in a rat infested apartment wishing you had published your boring life to inspire some person half way around the world to not be you. Rebecca Mead may have thought like that. Instead of moping about it she got a decent education and dedicated her life to finding out everything she could about her hero. George Elliot.
After reading both books I see why we had to read this one last. We would have been totally lost had we read it first. We wouldn’t know anything and it would have kind of weird. We wouldn’t have known any of the characters or their relationships with any one. We also wouldn’t have known where Elliot got the idea to write the book. Mead also shows a new side to the book that you can’t really get to know unless you know the history.
Mead showed us how she fell in love with Middlemarch and had to know more about it. She shows us how Elliot took people from normal everyday life that she knew changed their name and maybe gave them a bit more personality and made them more provincial. Elliot wrote a book that turned into eight installments through out her life. Mead also shows us why Middlemarch is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,”
Eliot also seemed to make herself the main female character whoever you may think that is in her book. Whether you think it is Rosamond, Celia, Mary, or Dorothea you can probably find a little of George Elliot in some aspect of the female characters in Middlemarch. She also told us where Mary Ann Evans got her pen name that she is best known for. She actually got the name from a married man that she was in love with and who she was living with. She also had to use a male’s name to be taken seriously in a misogynistic world of Victorian England where women were suppose to be supported by a man and just have kids.
Eliot was apparently a forward thinker as shown in Middlemarch and Meade tells us. She apparently lived on her own and supported herself by writing Middlemarch. Eliot also was given an excellent education and seemed to always be reading. That was probably the reason she decided to become an author. She was already an editor and her own editor loved her work and was one of the few people who actually knew who George Eliot really was.
Mead probably felt the book was written for adults, because what kind of teenager even back then, would go through half of the stuff the characters went through. Adults loose their spouses more often than young girls. They get thrown into debt without actually thinking of the consequences. It also takes some maturity to see how greedy some relatives and other people can be. It is hard to see when people show their true colors after a relative dies or is close to death. Mead tells the entire life of George Elliot in a few hundred pages. No every famous person stories has to be long or glamorous just look at what Mead had to say about Eliot.
Julia Rogan