Middlemarch

The closest structural parallel — dual plots about marriage, idealism, and social constraint, written at almost exactly the same time. Tolstoy is more punitive; Eliot more consolatory; both are supreme.

Isabel Archer is Dorothea without Eliot's philosophical scaffolding. James acknowledged Eliot as his primary model and borrowed her techniques for the novel of consciousness.

The same provincial-idealism-crushed-by-circumstance story told without Eliot's consolation. Hardy's world is structurally indifferent to human aspiration in a way Eliot refuses to accept.

Another novel about female intelligence with nowhere institutional to go — but Brontë's is more autobiographically raw and less philosophically organized than Eliot's

Eliot's most autobiographical novel, written before Middlemarch — Maggie Tulliver is a first sketch of Dorothea, less philosophically resolved and more personally wounded

Woolf learned free indirect discourse from Eliot and condensed it into a single day. Middlemarch is the ancestor; Woolf is the radical compression and intensification of its central technique.