In fact, Mead was wise not to omit herself from this story, as her feelings about the great work and its themes of women’s roles, relationships and self-delusion are far more insightful than a barrage of facts would have been. Obviously fleshed out from her New Yorker article “Middlemarch and Me,” Mead ( One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, 2007) could have simply written a dense biography of Mary Ann Evans, who would go on to write some of the most enduring novels of the Victorian era under her pen name. When it works well-e.g., Alan Light’s The Holy and the Broken (2012)-the results can be marvelous. This subgenre-examining personal history through the echoes of a singular work of art-can be riddled with land mines. A New Yorker writer examines the arc of her life in the reflection of George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
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