Middlemarch

By George Eliot

1872

Literary Fiction

Subtitled *A Study of Provincial Life*, Middlemarch is George Eliot's sprawling panorama of a fictional English Midlands town in the years around the Reform Act of 1832. Through interlocking storylines — the idealistic Dorothea Brooke and her ill-matched marriage to the dry scholar Casaubon, the ambitious young doctor Lydgate and his entanglement with Rosamond Vincy, and the affable wastrel Fred Vincy — Eliot examines thwarted aspiration, the slow erosion of youthful ideals, and the quiet heroism of ordinary lives. Renowned for its psychological insight and its compassionate, often intrusive narrator, it is regularly cited as one of the finest novels ever written in English.