Middlemarch

Description

George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as 'one of the few English novels written for adult people'.

Mary Ann Evans (1819-80) began her literary career as a translator and later editor of the Westminster Review. In 1857, she published SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE, the first of eight novels she would publish under the name of 'George Eliot', including THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, MIDDLEMARCH, and DANIEL DERONDA. Rosemary Ashton is Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London.

"One of the few English novels written for grown-up people" -- Virginia Woolf "The most profound, wise and absorbing of English novels...and, above all, truthful and forgiving about human behavior." -- Hermione Lee