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 ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

Ask some readers their favorite book, and they'll rattle off a list of five or 10 but cannot narrow their dedication to one book or author. Ask others, and they'll respond without hesitation with ...

George Eliot is the least readily lovable of the great English novelists. Like Dickens, she championed strong moral principles in her fiction, but unlike Dickens, she had the inconsideration to live ...

This week in the magazine, Rebecca Mead writes about George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.” (Subscribers can read the full text; others can buy access to the issue via the digital edition.) On the Book Bench, ...

My junior year at Brown, I was so unhappy that I dropped out. In Arizona, I met a man; and I read Middlemarch. My junior year at Brown, I was so unhappy that I dropped out. The place had begun to ...

We have only Joyce Carol Oates to remind us that our sense of Middlemarch’s importance is inflated: “Does George Eliot, wonderful as she is, and certainly comforting in the unwavering sanity of her ...

Everyone has a list of unread books that weighs on her conscience each passing year that it remains unchanged. At the top of mine was “Middlemarch,” by George Eliot, a classic that I managed to put ...

Meg Wolitzer's latest novel is The Interestings. I have to admit that the first time I tried to read Middlemarch by George Eliot, I ended up putting it aside after only 20 pages. My teenage self, ...

"Middlemarch" is one of those books whose fans reread it once every few years, and no wonder. It's not only an absorbing story, or rather a big set of interconnected stories (all set in the same ...

At the beginning of “My Life in Middlemarch,’’ Rebecca Mead observes that there “are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.” In this blend of biography, memoir, ...