“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
A masterly evocation of life in a provincial English
community, Middlemarch is considered perhaps the
greatest novel of the
Victorian era, 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.