Middlemarch

George Eliot?s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopli ng its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriag e to the pedantic scholar Casaubon the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprude nt marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scan dalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as ?one of the few English novels written for grown-up people?.This edition uses the text of the second edition of 1874. In h er introduction, Rosemary Ashton, biographer of George Eliot, discusses themes of change in Middlemarch, and examines the novel as a n imaginative embodiment of Eliot?s humanist beliefs.

• author: George Eliot