Middlemarch
Who among us has not thought: I want to live a full life, to do something that matters — and found that life's actual texture resists such ambitions? That gap between vision and reality is the subject of George Eliot's masterwork.
What Makes This Book Essential
Middlemarch follows four interlocking stories in a Midlands town in the 1830s. Its primary focus is Dorothea Brooke — brilliant, idealistic, and suffocating in a world that offers women nothing but marriage as an outlet for intelligence. Her marriage to the elderly scholar Casaubon is a tragedy of thwarted aspiration; her later relationship with the passionate Ladislaw a cautious redemption.
Running parallel is Lydgate's story: a gifted young doctor whose ambitions are gradually eroded by debt and a bad marriage. Both plots illuminate the same truth: that the conditions of our lives — class, gender, money, accident — shape us as powerfully as character. Eliot sees everything and judges nothing. Her compassion for flawed people is the novel's deepest quality.
Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.' The Penguin Classics edition includes Rosemary Ashton's essential introduction and extensive notes.
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