Middlemarch

About this book

In the Midlands town of Middlemarch, idealistic Dorothea Brooke marries the wrong scholar; young doctor Tertius Lydgate arrives with plans to modernize medicine and finds himself entangled in local politics and debt; gossip links fortunes and reputations across drawing rooms and farms. Eliot weaves multiple lives into a panoramic study of ambition, marriage, hypocrisy, and small-town constraint. Her intelligence is generous as well as sharp, she understands why people compromise and why they resist. Often called the greatest English novel, Middlemarch rewards patient reading with the sense of having lived an entire community's hopes and failures alongside its characters.