Meet the residents of Middlemarch and view human nature as a number of relationships unfold. George Eliot set her novel some 40 years before it was written, and her overview of the times ensures a full-bodied novel with political and social commentary. She allows us to see flaws, she opens up the reality and frailty of human emotions and yet I don’t feel as though she makes judgement which makes this such a wonderful novel to sink into and experience.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'One of the few English novels written for grown-up people' Virginia Woolf
George Eliot's nuanced and moving novel is a masterly evocation of connected lives, changing fortunes and human frailties in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past.
Edited with an Introduction and notes by ROSEMARY ASHTON
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
Author
About George Eliot, Rosemary Ashton
Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) (1819-80) was a philosopher, journalist and translator before she became a novelist, her first stories being published in 1856. She led an unconventional life, co-editing the liberal journal Westminster Review for three years and living with the married man and philosopher George Henry Lewes. Her novels are among the greatest of the nineteenth century
