Middlemarch

About

Set in a provincial English town on the eve of the 1832 Reform Act, Middlemarch interweaves the lives of idealistic Dorothea Brooke, who marries the desiccated scholar Casaubon in hope of a life of purpose, and the ambitious young doctor Lydgate, whose reforming vision is undone by a disastrous marriage to the beautiful Rosamond Vincy. Around them turn the fortunes of the banker Bulstrode, the wastrel Fred Vincy, and a whole community caught between tradition and change. Eliot's vast web of destinies examines how noble ambitions are eroded by circumstance, temperament, and the pressure of ordinary life. Virginia Woolf famously called it "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."

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