Mead, who took no offense, laughed in an interview that she would like it known that she has read Joyce and Dostoyevsky, thanks. In Sunday’s New York Times book review, Joyce Carol Oates praised Mead’s bow to her favorite book, but sniffed: “There is something self-limiting if not solipsistic about focusing so narrowly on a single novel through the course of one’s life.” Then she prescribed “Ulysses” and “Crime and Punishment.” the keeping of saddle horses: a man would naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship.” In fact, she had “strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books!’’ She was book smart, yes, and due to come into an inheritance, yet prospective husbands had reason to keep right on walking: “Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere with. You know a Dorothea Brooke or two, I’ll bet, even if you’ve not read the book Mary Ann Evans published under a pseudonym in 1871: Miss Brooke “was enamored of intensity and greatness,’’ her creator wrote, “and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects.” So, too, was she “likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it.’’ Poor Dodo, as her younger sister Celia called her, “liked giving up.” "My Life in Middlemarch," by Rebecca Mead (AP/AP) “It kind of blew my head off,’’ says my college friend Lynn Joyce Hunter, a therapist, “because she knew me better than I knew myself, and knew that even if Disney thinks we want to marry princes, we actually want to marry men who help us understand the universe of course’’ Dorothea would marry Casaubon. So what is it about this book that’s held so many of us in thrall for decades? That convinced my neighbor Michelle Brafman, a fiction writer, too, “that if I were the kind of person who put one of those bumper stickers of where their kids go to school on their car, mine would say ‘I’m a George Eliot person’ ”? That reassured Washington lawyer Andrea Paterson that she’d done the right thing in dropping out of that PhD program? Or made feminist biblical scholar Alice Bach, who lived at the Catholic Worker house in the Bowery for the last year of Dorothy Day’s life, feel that it was almost as much Dorothea as Dorothy who would have shaped her moral view of money? Rebecca Mead, whose new book, “ My Life in Middlemarch,” comes out Tuesday, was 17 when she first read it, eager to associate herself with what Virginia Woolf had called “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Her ode to the “one book I had never stopped reading” in the 30 years since then is only lightly autobiographical standing next to Eliot, only a fool would have tried to draw too much attention to herself. “I had just turned 18,’’ she wrote in “In America,” “and a third of the way through burst into tears because I realized not only that I was Dorothea” - George Eliot’s earnest, self-deluding heroine - “but that a few months earlier, I had married Casaubon,’’ the dry doggy biscuit of a husband Dorothea had tricked herself into marrying, since none of the other “great men who odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure” were available. Kennedy was shot.” Or when the twin towers fell. Two decades ago, Mary Gordon wrote that a “ certain kind of woman remembers what was happening in her life when she read ‘ Middlemarch,’ the way Americans are all supposed to know what they were doing when John F.
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