Middlemarch: A Victorian Classic of Provincial Life, Marriage, and Moral Ambition

Middlemarch is George Eliot's great novel of provincial English life, marriage, ambition, reform, disappointment, and moral growth. Set in the fictional Midlands town of Middlemarch during the years surrounding the Reform Bill, the novel follows Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate, Rosamond Vincy, Fred Vincy, Mary Garth, and a wide cast of interconnected characters whose private choices are shaped by property, class, religion, gender, medicine, politics, and social expectation. Eliot gives the...