Rebecca Mead

Rebecca Mead was born in London.[1] When she was three years old she relocated with her family to Weymouth, Dorset, where she was raised.[1]

Mead's father was a civil servant, and she has described her background as lower middle class.[2][3] As a teenager she became interested in left-wing politics.[4]

She studied English literature at the University of Oxford.[4]

Mead graduated from Oxford and won a full scholarship to study a master's degree in journalism at New York University.[3] She would later comment, "studying journalism in a classroom, it turned out, was mostly absurd".[4]

While at NYU, Mead was employed as an intern by New York Magazine.[1] After graduation the magazine employed her as a fact checker.[1] After a few years she was promoted to features writer.[4]

Mead joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1997.[5]

Mead was naturalised as an American citizen in 2011.[3]

Mead published My Life In Middlemarch (The Road to Middlemarch in the UK) in 2014. A personal study of George Eliot's best-known novel, it received mixed reviews.[6][7][8]

Mead relocated to Britain in 2018.[3]