Rebecca Mead was a young woman in a coastal town of England when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs and then marriage and family, Rebecca Mead reread the novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." It gave Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this memoir, Rebecca Mead leads the reader into the life that her favorite book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that perfectly mirrors that of the novel, it takes the themes of Eliot's novel and brings them into the world. A biography of Eliot and an uncanny portrait of the ways in which Mead's life echoes that of the author herself -- showing the power of literature to shape our lives.