Rebecca Mead read Middlemarch for the first time when she was 17 while she was studying for her Oxford entrance exams. From the first sentence—”Miss Brooke had the kind of beauty which seems to be ...

Letters: Malcolm Bellamy on how he is finally getting through Middlemarch. Also letters from Roger Osborne and Roz Connery ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

Ask some readers their favorite book, and they'll rattle off a list of five or 10 but cannot narrow their dedication to one book or author. Ask others, and they'll respond without hesitation with ...

New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead first read George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ at age 17, when she was an ambitious schoolgirl studying for entrance exams to Oxford. She recalls identifying ‘completely’ with ...

George Eliot is the least readily lovable of the great English novelists. Like Dickens, she championed strong moral principles in her fiction, but unlike Dickens, she had the inconsideration to live ...

My junior year at Brown, I was so unhappy that I dropped out. In Arizona, I met a man; and I read Middlemarch. My junior year at Brown, I was so unhappy that I dropped out. The place had begun to ...

We have only Joyce Carol Oates to remind us that our sense of Middlemarch’s importance is inflated: “Does George Eliot, wonderful as she is, and certainly comforting in the unwavering sanity of her ...

"Middlemarch" is one of those books whose fans reread it once every few years, and no wonder. It's not only an absorbing story, or rather a big set of interconnected stories (all set in the same ...

‘My Life in Middlemarch’ (Crown), by Rebecca Mead New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead first read George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ at age 17, when she was an ambitious schoolgirl studying for entrance exams to ...

At the beginning of “My Life in Middlemarch,’’ Rebecca Mead observes that there “are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.” In this blend of biography, memoir, ...