As I discovered myself in college through the usual college
experiences – love and inevitable heartbreak, near death experiences, substance
abuse, faculty crushes and obsessive author fandom – I too, developed an
outsize admiration for several women writers.
It was the end of the 1970’s and feminist themed literature courses were
in vogue. We read Toni Morrison,
Virginia Woolf, Nikki Giovanni, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Margaret
Atwood, Jane Austen, Doris Lessing, Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade
Bambara and Gertrude Stein with the devotion of acolytes. Engagement in the
products of these writers varied, but an attention-getter in any course was the
writer with the outré personality; the outsider; the gender boundary-pusher.
One could check all the boxes with George Eliot whose personal life far
outshone her work for this reader. (After all, I had Silas Marner foisted on me in high school as many did, but never
had I learned about the life or politics of the writer behind it.)
My Life In Middlemarch
by Rebecca Mead did not so much engage me as enlist me as an admirer. This book is the literary criticism I would
have inhaled when I was in college,
and now, thirty years later, I can only admire as a testament to reading, rereading
and author obsession. Middlemarch is
immortal literature and a life’s touchstone for Ms. Mead more than a century
later, but for some of us, George Eliot’s imagined city remains a place both foreign and strange, to
which we do not care to return.
