Middlemarch and the Imperfect Life

“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.

PAMELA ERENS is the author of Matasha, a novel for readers age 10 to 14, and the adult novels The Virgins,Eleven Hours, and The Understory. Erens’s books have been named finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her essays and criticism have appeared in publications including The New York Times,Vogue,Elle, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review,and Los Angeles Review of Books.