- Random House
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 thrown into relief by poor dress”—it was true love.
- George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans was considered one of the cleverest women of her time, and also one of the ugliest. Romance eluded her until her late 30s when, in a tiny London bookshop, she met George Lewes, another writer. Lewes, unfortunately, was already married. His wife, however, was not insane and locked away in an attic. Instead she was merely flagrantly unfaithful—four of her seven children were fathered by men who were not Lewes—but in Victorian England, divorce was legally almost impossible. Still, it was considered a terrific scandal when Evans moved in with Lewes and lived with him as his wife. The “marriage” was apparently a very happy one (an occurrence quite rare in Victorian literary circles; for a catalog of misery, check out Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives), and it lasted until his death in 1878. Lewes was the one who encouraged Evans to write fiction; in gratitude, she took his first name as her pen name, and “Eliot” may have been a contraction of “L: I owe it.” (I’ve also heard “George Eliot” came from “to George, I owe a lot.”)
That’s OK, though. Rebecca Mead has her Book and I have mine. Technically, I have several books that I’ve read several times that have never stopped meaning something to me, but Mead inspired me to go back to the very first one, which I too discovered when I was 17 and which, like Mead, I enthusiastically discussed at a college interview. (And, like Mead, I got in!) That would be The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham.
As Mead points out, it’s a good book that can still teach you things 20 years after you first read it.
