In this rich and teeming portrait of provincial life in Victorian England, a panoply of complex, brilliantly drawn characters attempt to carry out their destinies against the various social expectations that accompany their class and gender.

At the center of the narrative is Dorothea Brooke, a thoughtful and idealistic young woman determined to make a difference with her life. Enamored of a man who she believes is setting this example, she traps herself into a loveless marriage. Her parallel is Tertius Lydgate, a young doctor from the city whose passionate ambition to spread the new science of medicine is complicated by his love for the wrong woman.

Epic in scope and unsurpassed in its study of human nature, Middlemarch is one of the greatest works in all of world literature.

George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans (1819-1880), was an English novelist of the first rank among Victorian novelists. She was born near Nuneaton, the daughter of a land agent. After her father’s death, she became an assistant editor for the Westminster Review from 1851 to 1854. She wrote her first fiction in 1857 and her first full-length novel, Adam Bede, in 1859. Her novels presented a beautifully observed world of peasants and townsfolk, but her greatest preoccupation was with moral problems, especially the moral development of her characters.