February 12, 2014
Our lives can teach us how to read a book
“A book may not tell us exactly how to live our lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book. Now when I read the novel in light of Eliot’s life, and in light of my own, I see her experience of unexpected family woven deep into the fabric of the novel–not as part of the book’s obvious pattern, but as part of its tensile strength. Middlemarch seems charged with the question of being a stepmother: of how one might do well by one’s stepchildren, or unwittingly fail them, and of all that might be gained from opening one’s heard wider.” –Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch
