In the The Living Novel, published in 1946, V.S. Pritchett wrote, “No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative …I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot …No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully.”

Over the course of this summer, you are invited to join the lively conversation among readers by sharing your thoughts and observations about these two marvelous books. Each student will write at least eight blog posts of 500 words before returning to campus in the fall, and we invite all readers to share your remarks as often as you feel so inclined. We have no doubt that the novel, and Rebecca Mead’s illuminating examination of her own reading experience, will provoke a enthusiastic discourse.

Writing in The New York Times, Joyce Carol Oates described My Life in Middlemarch as a “poignant testimony to the abiding power of fiction.” The book is a “bibliomemoir,” she writes, “a subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate, confessional tone of autobiography.”

Many readers have books to which they return, again and again over the years, each time receiving from them something new and valuable. In My Life in Middlemarch, Rebecca Mead writes, “I have grown up with George Eliot. I think Middlemarch has disciplined my character. I know it has become part of my own experience and my own endurance. Middlemarch inspired me when I was young, and chafing to leave home; and now, in middle life, it suggests to me what else home might mean, beyond a place to grow up and grow out of.”