For Rebecca Mead, there is no doubt that it will be George Eliot's massive work Middlemarch.
First reading this when she was 17, she has reread it every five years, reinterpreting and developing insights about human nature along with those interpretations. Thirty years later, she has embarked on a major piece of investigative journalism that is informed by her relationship with Middlemarch, its characters and their author. She has usedletters and diaries, visited significant villages and dwellings, met descendants and viewed collections of objects.
A well-ordered biographical notes and acknowledgements section allows for further exploration by the interested reader.
George Eliot's identity was made known publicly after she published Adam Bede. Charles Dickens, who suspected Eliot was really a woman when he read Scenes of Clerical Life, wrote to her, stating that ''Adam Bede has taken its place among the actual experiences and endurances of my life''.
Mead comments on his apt identification of the potency of a great book, the way a book can insert itself into a reader's own history, into a reader's own life story, until it's hard to know what one would be without it. It is this potency she explores through considered and justified reflections on Eliot's life and times, the lives and characteristics of the characters in Middlemarch and her own life.
Middlemarch, at more than 800 pages, was too large to be acceptable in one book, so was published in eight. This put pressure on Eliot to complete and allowed readers and critics to anticipate each new offering. The marriage plot of 19th-century novels was revised when Eliot put the wedding at the beginning - the marriage of Dorothea, Miss Brooke, to the person she saw as an intellectual to be loved and supported, Edward Casaubon, the pedantic clergyman. They are quite unrealistic about each other, and in essence unsuited.
Mead cannot resist a piece of speculation about what Jane Austen might have done with these characters and that of Will Ladislaw, Dorothea's second husband. She sees in the depiction of a flawed marriage not simply one person being misunderstood, but that incompatibility consists of two people failing each other in their powers of comprehension. Dorothea had not yet listened patiently to Edward's heartbeats, but only feeling that her own was beating violently.
This notion, that we each have our own centre of gravity, but must come to discover that others weigh the world differently, is constantly repeated in the book. For Mead, in her successive readings of Middlemarch this necessity of growing out of self-centredness is the theme of Middlemarch.
In the conclusion of Middlemarch, George Eliot writes that marriage, ''which has been the bourne of so many narratives is still a great beginning''. Middlemarch is punctuated with marriages. It begins with one, has one in the middle and two more at the end. Mead considers none of these functions as an ending. Instead she sees them as the start of a story, what Eliot describes as ''the beginning of the home epic''. Every marriage amounts to an epic voyage of discovery.
Has Mead's insightful reflection on these fictional and actual lives encouraged me to reread the 800-plus pages of Middlemarch? Indeed yes, and with a richer approach.
- Willie Campbell is a Dunedin educator.
Win a copy
The ODT has five copies of The Road to Middlemarch, by Rebecca Mead (RRP$40), to give away courtesy of Text Publishing.
For your chance to win a copy, email playtime@odt.co.nz with your name and postal address in the body of the email, and ''Middlemarch Book Competition'' in the subject line, by 5pm on Tuesday, February 18.
