A Southern Booksellers Association Recommendation
“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
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
My Life in Middlemarch
and
Home/Land
A masterly evocation of life in a provincial English community,
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
"rescued” her, first as a distressed college student, and then during the tragic events of the global pandemic.