George Eliot 
Middlemarch 

‘Many others have said it before, and more eloquently, but, man, is ‘Middlemarch’ good. I mean, miss-your-stop-on-the-train and sneak-a-read-at-work good.’ – The New Yorker

Considered one the masterpieces of realist fiction, George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch 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’.

‘What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory.’ – Emily Dickinson

‘The most meaningful lives, I’ve learned, are often not the extraordinary ones. They’re the ordinary ones lived with dignity. There’s perhaps no better expression of that wisdom than George Eliot’s Middlemarch.’ – The New York Times

About the author

George Eliot was the pen name of the novelist Mary Anne Evans. Born in 1819 in rural Warwickshire, in 1841 she moved to Coventry, the city she would later use as inspiration for the fictional town of Middlemarch. There she joined a circle of free-thinking intellectuals and lost her Christian faith. After a period abroad, she settled in London to work as an editor at the left-wing Westminster Review. Eliot openly co-habited with the married philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes in defiance of contemporary notions of propriety. Lewes encouraged her to write fiction, for which she adopted her male pseudonym. Although female authors were published under their own names during her lifetime, she wanted to escape the stereotype of women’s writing being limited to lighthearted romances. She also wanted to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic. Another factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny, thus avoiding the scandal that would have arisen because of her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes.

She wrote seven novels, Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-63), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72) and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of which are set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.

Middlemarch has been described by the novelists Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language – and triumphed in BBC Culture’s poll of the greatest British novels, as voted by the rest of the world.