The woman reader in Rebecca Mead’s My life in Middlemarch

ABSTRACT

Before the entry of feminist scholars into the field, literary theory either had no interest in the woman reader or used her to represent the type of reading that favours identification, escape and pleasure over engagement with the aesthetic and formal aspects of a text. According to feminist cultural and literary theorists such as Charlotte Brunsdon and Rita Felski, the woman reader has typically been defined as passive and uncreative, her interests as trivial and sentimental, her reading as consequently apolitical. Feminist literary theory and feminist cultural studies have long challenged the sharp divide between feminist and ‘ordinary’ women readers, academic and non-academic readers, creative and uncreative readers, pointing out that they are more alike than we are led to believe because they share certain affective and cognitive attributes. This artificial dichotomy is also called into question by popular memoirs on books and reading, which showcase the creativity of non-academic reading. One example is the 2014 book My Life in Middlemarch, journalist Rebecca Mead’s account of her lifelong relationship with George Eliot’s novel. Mead’s book, which combines literary criticism, biography and memoir, highlights the impact literature can have on its readers. I read Mead’s book as an example of Rita Felski’s theoretical concept of a ‘positive aesthetics’, a framework for reading texts that blends criticism and analysis with attachment and love. Using Felski’s categories of textual engagement, such as recognition, enchantment and knowledge, I argue that Mead’s project, by giving equal weight to emotional and intellectual aspects of reading, represents an important step in bridging the divide between academic and non-academic readers.

KEYWORDS:

• Rebecca Mead
• reading
• woman reader
• recognition
• enchantment
• positive aesthetics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Other recent books about reading which engage with literary criticism, feminism, and memoir in various ways include, for example, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010), Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012), Kirsty Gunn’s My Katherine Mansfield Project (2015) and Jessa Crispin’s The Dead Ladies Project (2015). I have chosen to analyze Rebecca Mead’s book because it focuses on a single novel, demonstrates how Mead’s reading of this novel has changed during the course of her own life, and emphasizes the importance of love as a crucial reason for reading and re-reading literary works. Additionally, the book was eagerly awaited and later discussed on popular feminist websites, now sadly no longer active, such as The Hairpin (Seltzer 2014) and The Toast (Cliffe 2014).

2 In an especially appropriate turn of phrase, Felski declares that in our attempt to explain how and why people read ‘we should relinquish, once and for all, the pursuit of a master concept, a key to all mythologies’ (Felski 2008, p. 15).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maša Grdešić

Maša Grdešić is Assistant Professor at the Department of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia. She obtained her PhD at the University of Zagreb in 2010 and has published three books in Croatian (Cosmopolitics: cultural studies, feminism, and women’s magazines, 2013; Introduction to narratology, 2015; The pitfalls of being polite. essays on feminism and popular culture, 2020). She was one of the founders and editors of Muf, a Croatian feminist website (2014–2018).