Middlemarch

Middlemarch by George Eliot is widely regarded as the greatest novel in the English language — a panoramic study of life in a fictional English Midlands town in the 1830s that encompasses politics, medicine, religion, marriage, and the aspirations and disappointments of a whole community. The novel’s heroine, Dorothea Brooke — idealistic, intelligent, and constrained by the limits placed on women in her society — is one of literature’s most fully realised characters. But Middlemarch is as much about its community as its individuals: Eliot’s sympathetic imagination extends to every character, making this a genuinely democratic novel about the value of ordinary life. Published by Wordsworth Classics in an accessible edition, this is the essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what the novel can do at its greatest extent.