Middlemarch
by George Eliot
George Eliot (nicknamed Mary Ann Evans), often called the greatest English novelist of the nineteenth century, created a great panorama of life in the Midlands provincial town on Middlemarch. At the center of the story is the intellectual and idealistic Dorothea Brooke - a character who in many ways resembles Elliot himself. But the same qualities that separate Dorothea from the materialistic, despicable society around her lead her to a disastrous marriage to a man for whom she made a mistake for her soul mate. In a parallel story, the no less idealistic young doctor Tertius Lidgate falls in love with the beautiful, but vain and superficial Rosamund Vincey, whom he marries in ruins. Eliot surrounds his main figures with a gallery of characters drawn from every social class, from workers and shopkeepers to a growing middle class to members of the rich, land-owning gentry. Together, they form an extremely rich and accurately detailed portrait of British provincial life in the 1830s. But Dorothea and Lidgate's struggle to maintain their moral integrity amid temptations and tragedies reminds us that their world is very similar to ours. Strikingly modern in its painful irony and psychological savvy, Middlemarch played a key role in shaping twentieth-century literary realism.
