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.