Howard shared this beautiful podcast with me tonight:

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/books/books-podcast-archive.html?pagewanted=all (from January 26th, 2014)

It's a New York Times Book Review podcast with Rebecca Mead discussing her memoir My Life in Middlemarch. It's so inspiring and beautiful and will make you want to (re)read Middlemarch. I loved hearing her talk about something I am currently enjoying, and it also opened my perspective up to a wider, more compassionate view of the novel and its characters.

In this review of the memoir by Joyce Carol Oates, she quotes Virginia Woolf as saying Middlemarch is "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Ha! I'll have to find her essay on George Eliot. I'm sure I have it somewhere.