Middlemarch and the Imperfect Life
Published by Ig Publishing in 2022
Purchase the book at Amazon, Bookshop, Ig Publishing, or your favorite indie bookstore
You can read an excerpt here.
From the publisher:
A masterly evocation of life in a provincial English community, George Eliot’s Middlemarch is a classic of Victorian literature, praised by writers from Emily Dickinson to Virginia Woolf.
In the latest volume in Ig's acclaimed Bookmarked series, critically lauded author Pamela Erens talks about how Middlemarch “rescued” her, first as a distressed college student and then during the tragic events of the global pandemic. Erens explores the influence Middlemarch had on her development as a novelist and the way it called into question the narratives she told herself about her life.
About the Bookmarked series:
Launched in 2015, the series matches established authors with works of literature that have been formative in their personal and writing lives. Each volume is an open-ended exploration imprinted with the Bookmarked author’s unique style. Other works in the series include Steve Almond on Stoner; Robin Black on Mrs. Dalloway; Steve Yarbrough on The Last Picture Show, Kim McLarin on Another Country, and Sven Birkerts on Speak, Memory.
A Southern Bookseller Review Recommended Title
“Delightful . . . The connections between Middlemarch and Erens’s own life are original and surprising, and her belief in the power of books is a balm in troubled times.”
—Publishers Weekly. Read the full review.
“The surprise and pleasure of Erens’ assessment may be located in how thoughtfully she integrates Middlemarch into her own life and our present society, the way it reveals how a melancholy virtue of tolerance can endure for a couple of centuries and change.”
—Mark Athitakis, On the Seawall. Read the full review.
“In this trenchant memoir of reading and writing, Pamela Erens returns over a lifetime to George Eliot's Middlemarch. The calm, understanding, and generosity that she finds in Eliot's masterpiece—albeit differently, at different moments in her own life—inflects Erens’s own account of becoming, and being, a mother and a writer. This short book is filled with wisdom."
—Claire Messud, author of Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write and The Woman Upstairs
“Erens makes an engaging and convincing case for the value of reading Middlemarch today, when we are still struggling to answer the questions it raises—about marriage, about community, about society, and especially about how to balance our individual needs and desires against the claims of sympathy and conscience.”
—Rohan Maitzen, author, Widening the Skirts of Light: Essays on George Eliot and Middlemarch for Book Clubs
“Thoughtful, frank, and always artful, Middlemarch and the Imperfect Life is an involving and deeply satisfying account of the reading and writing life.”
—Rebecca Mead, author, My Life in Middlemarch and Home/Land