Middlemarch

At a Glance

In the English Midlands town of Middlemarch in 1829-32, two idealists are crushed by the gap between their aspirations and reality. Dorothea Brooke, a young woman of passionate intelligence, marries the dried-up scholar Casaubon, hoping to assist great work, and discovers she has entombed herself. Tertius Lydgate, a reforming doctor with scientific ambitions, marries the beautiful Rosamond Vincy and is slowly strangled by debt and her social climbing. Around them, a web of provincial life plays out — political reform, religious hypocrisy, inheritance schemes, and the quiet endurance of ordinary people making the best of lives that fall short of what they dreamed.

Why This Book Matters

Middlemarch was immediately recognized as one of the greatest English novels — the contemporary response was more positive than for most Victorian novels. Virginia Woolf called it 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.' It has never gone out of print, never been out of the academic canon, and has consistently ranked among the top five novels in major polls of critics and writers. It is simultaneously the pinnacle of Victorian realism and the ancestor of the modernist interior novel.

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