Middlemarch and the BBC?

The cover of the January 26, 2014 issue of the New York Times Book Review is a review of My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead. I had never read George Eliot’s thick Victorian novel and finished it about the time Middlemarch began to receive current attention thanks to Mead’s book. As a writer, I kept asking myself: how did Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans) do it? How did she write this much text and keep the various romances and plot elements straight without a computer? How did she write this i...