One of the most ambitious narratives of nineteenth-century realism, Middlemarch tells the story of an entire town in the years leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832, a time when modern methods were starting to challenge old orthodoxies. Eliot's sophisticated and acute characterization gives rich expression to every nuance of feeling, and vividly brings to life the town's inhabitantsincluding the young idealist Dorothea Brooke, the dry scholar Casaubon, the young, passionate reformist doctor Lydgate, the flighty young beauty Rosamond, and the old, secretive banker Bulstrodeas they move in counterpoint to each other. Art, religion, politics, society, science, human relationships in all their complexitynothing is left unexamined under the narrator's microscope. Also included in this edition are pictures and an extensive section on George Eliot's life and works.
Few novelists have ever attempted so broad a canvas as George Eliot in her masterpiece, Middlemarch. Portraying every level of social life in a provincial Midlands town called Middlemarch, she interweaves several intensely dramatic stories of love and death, betrayal and reconciliation, into one of the finest pictures of nineteenth-century England ever created. Its acute psychological penetration also makes it an exceptionally modern work, particularly in the romantic idealism of Dorothea Brooke, who often resembles George Eliot herself, and in the disastrous marriage and thwarted career of the young reformist doctor, Lydgate. Virginia Woolf called it one of the few English novels written for grown-up peopleand it is truly great literature that ranks among the best novels in the world.
An analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate This title includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid nineteenth century
A story which evokes a bygone rural life, and is charged with a personal passion that intensifies the novel's outer dramas of seduction and betrayal and inner dramas of moral growth and redemption.
