In a probing analysis that has broad implications for theories of reading, Bernard J. Paris explores how personal needs and changes in his own psychology have affected his responses to George Eliot over the years. Having lost his earlier enthusiasm for her "Religion of Humanity," he now appreciates the psychological intuitions that are embodied in her brilliant portraits of characters and relationships. Concentrating on Eliot's most impressive psychological novels, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, Paris focuses on her detailed portrayals of major characters in an effort to recover her intuitions and appreciate her mimetic achievement. He argues that although she intended for her characters to provide confirmation of her views, she was instead led to deeper, more enduring truths, although she did not consciously comprehend the discoveries she had made. Like her characters, Paris argues, these truths must be disengaged from her rhetoric in order to be perceived.

A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories. Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.

On April 10, 1994, PBS stations nationwide will air the first episode of a lavish six-part Masterpiece Theatre production of Eliot's brilliant work, Middlemarch, hosted by Russell Baker and produced by Louis Marks. The Modern Library is pleased to offer this official companion edition, complete with tie-in art and printed on acid-free paper. Unabridged.

After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently reread, canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but didn’t, guilty pleasures (books she oughtn’t to have liked but did), and stories reread for fun vs. those read for the classroom. On Rereading records the sometimes surprising, always fascinating, results of her personal experiment. Spacks addresses a number of intriguing questions raised by the purposeful act of rereading: Why do we reread novels when, in many instances, we can remember the plot? Why, for example, do some lovers of Jane Austen’s fiction reread her novels every year (or oftener)? Why do young children love to hear the same story read aloud every night at bedtime? And why, as adults, do we return to childhood favorites such as The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter novels? What pleasures does rereading bring? What psychological needs does it answer? What guilt does it induce when life is short and there are so many other things to do (and so many other books to read)? Rereading, Spacks discovers, helps us to make sense of ourselves. It brings us sharply in contact with how we, like the books we reread, have both changed and remained the same.

An extraordinary masterpiece written from personal experience, Middlemarch is a deep psychological observation of human nature that revolves around the issues of love, jealousy, and obligation. Eliot's feminist views are apparent through the novel: she stresses the fact that women should control their own lives.

This carefully crafted ebook: "The Complete Works of George Eliot" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Table of Contents: Scenes of Clerical Life (1858): The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, Mr. Gilfil's Love Story, Janet's Repentance Adam Bede (1859) The Lifted Veil (1859) The Mill on the Floss (1860) Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe (1861) Romola (1863) Brother Jacob (1864) Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) The Spanish Gypsy (1868) Middlemarch (1871/72) The Legend of Jubal, and Other Poems (1874): The Legend of Jubal, Agatha, Armgart, How Lisa Loved the King, A Minor Prophet, Brother and Sister, Stradivarius, A College Breakfast-Party, Two Lovers, Self and Life, "Sweet Endings Come and Go, Love," The Death of Moses, Arion, "O May I Join the Choir Invisible." Daniel Deronda (1876) Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879) The Essays: From the Note-Book of an Eccentric, How to Avoid Disappointment, The Wisdom of the Child, A Little Fable with a Great Moral, Hints on Snubbing, Carlyle's Life of Sterling, Margaret Fuller, Woman in France: Madame de Sablé, Three Months in Weimar, Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming, German Wit: Henry Heine, The Natural History of German Life, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, George Forster, Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young, The Influence of Rationalism, The Grammar of Ornament, Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt, Leaves from a Note-Book. Miscellaneous Poems: On Being Called a Saint, Farewell, Sonnet, Question and Answer, "'Mid my Gold-Brown Curls," "'Mid the Rich Store," "As Tu Va la Lune se Lever," In A London Drawing Room, Arms! To Arms!, Ex Oriente Lux, In the South, Will Ladislaw's Song, Erinna, I Grant you Ample Leave, Mordecai's Hebrew Verses, Count that Day Lost.

It is well known that George Eliot's intelligence and her wide knowledge of literature, history, philosophy and religion shaped her fiction, but until now no study has followed the development of her thinking through her whole career. This intellectual biography traces the course of that development from her initial Christian culture, through her loss of faith and working out of a humanistic and cautiously progressive world view, to the thought-provoking achievements of her novels. It focuses on her responses to her reading in her essays, reviews and letters as well as in the historical pictures of Romola, the political implications of Felix Holt, the comprehensive view of English society in Middlemarch, and the visionary account of personal inspiration in Daniel Deronda. This portrait of a major Victorian intellectual is an important addition to our understanding of Eliot's mind and works, as well as of her place in nineteenth-century British culture.