Yesterday Howard brought me breakfast in bed on a tray, and next to the plate was Middlemarch. My edition (Everyman) starts with a chronology of her life and an introduction to the text. The chronology was mostly a list of the famous people who died as her life was starting, but got increasingly dramatic with the third and fourth cholera pandemic, and a little note from when she was 37 and told her family about her relationship with a married man, which ended in her being cut off. Two years later her sister died of tuberculosis.

I like reading my own book because I can write in it. Every page in the first chapter has something worth marking.