Middlemarch

In the Midlands town of Middlemarch, in the unsettled years around the 1832 Reform Bill, two ardent idealists set out to do some great good in the world. Dorothea Brooke marries the dry, elderly scholar Casaubon in the belief that she is binding herself to a great mind — and learns too late that his life’s work will never be finished and that he cannot love her. Tertius Lydgate, a gifted young doctor with dreams of advancing medical science, marries the beautiful, self-willed Rosamond Vincy and is slowly ground down by debt, provincial suspicion, and a wife who cannot imagine a smaller life than she wants.

Around these two thwarted hopes George Eliot weaves a whole society: the feckless Fred Vincy and the clear-eyed Mary Garth who will not have him until he is worth having; the banker Bulstrode, whose buried past rises at last to disgrace him; and Will Ladislaw, whose warmth is everything Casaubon’s cold house lacks. No act in Middlemarch falls without tugging at lives its author never meant to touch, and the novel’s great image is the web that binds them all.

First published in eight parts in 1871–72, Middlemarch is widely judged the greatest of all English novels — the book Virginia Woolf called one of the few written for grown-up people. Its unsparing study of marriage, vocation, and the limits a narrow world places on an intelligent woman culminates in one of fiction’s great affirmations of the unhistoric life: the good that leaves no monument and rests in unvisited tombs.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s composition and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.