Middlemarch

George Eliot's Middlemarch is a panoramic study of provincial English life in the years surrounding the Reform Bill of 1832, weaving together courtship, marriage, ambition, vocation, and moral failure. Through Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate, Rosamond Vincy, and a richly interdependent cast, Eliot transforms the realist novel into an instrument of ethical inquiry. Its supple, ironic narration combines psychological depth with social analysis, placing private desire within the pressures of clas ...