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Staff writer for The New Yorker Rebecca Mead gives a passionate account of her relationship with George Eliot’s Middlemarch and shows how we can live a more fulfilling life through a deep engagement with the great literary works. Mead, who is traveliing from the United States to be at the festival, was a young woman when she first read Middlemarch and has read it many times since, each time interpreting it and discovering it afresh. Mead looks at how the ambitions, dreams and attachments of its characters teach us to value the limitations of our own lives.

Mead was born and grew up in England, leaving for the United States in her 20s. She works for The New Yorker magazine and has also written for the London Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review.

Here she talks to Isabel Berwick, life and arts associate editor at FT Weekend.

This event is part of the American strand at this year’s festival.