George Eliot’s Middlemarch is one of the greatest of the great English-language novels, with characters that remain as exquisitely drawn and deeply alive as any in literature. The Restless Classics edition features a new introduction by Rebecca Mead, New Yorker writer and author of My Year in Middlemarch, in which she explores Eliot’s “meliorism”—her belief that individuals can improve society in small, everyday ways. Dorothea’s successes and failures not only in love but as an ardent social reformer will resonate with all of us who look at the world today and ask, as Dorothea did in her time, “What could she do, what ought she to do?”
Our new edition is also richly illustrated by artist Keren Katz, who has rendered Dorothea Brooke and her provincial 1830s world with over two dozen arresting, strikingly modern papercut illustrations. Preview them below, and as Mead writes in her introduction:, “Now read on, reach the ultimate sentence, and see the light widen.”
About the Book
About the Contributors
Rebecca Mead has been a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine since 1997. She is the author, most recently, of My Life in Middlemarch (Crown, 2014).
Keren Katz is a cartoonist, writer, and the non-fictitious half of The Katz Sisters Duo. She is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts’s MFA Illustration Program and Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. She is the author of two graphic novels The Academic Hour and The Backstage of a Dishwashing Webshow and was nominated for the SPX Ignatz Award for Outstanding Artist. Her work has been published in anthologies by Fantagraphics, Smoke Signal, Locust Moon, Rough House, Ink Brick, Retrofit Comics, The Brooklyn Rail, Kuš! (nominated for the SPX Ignatz Award for Outstanding Mini Comic), Carrier Pigeon and Seven Stories Press.
By George Eliot
Introduction by Rebecca Mead
Illustrations by Keren Katz
Restless Classics
With new illustrations and a brilliant original introduction by New Yorker writer and author of My Life in Middlemarch Rebecca Mead, the Restless Classics edition of Middlemarch presents George Eliot’s masterpiece of Victorian fiction in an appealing new light.
Paperback ISBN: 9781632063069 • Sep 14, 2021