Middlemarch

Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Dorothea is bright, beautiful and rebellious. Lydgate is the ambitious new doctor in town. Both of them long to make a positive difference in the world. But as so often in life, their stories do not proceed as expected and both they, and the other inhabitants of Middlemarch, must struggle to reconcile themselves to their fates and find their places in a fast-changing world. Middlemarch contains all of life: the rich and the poor, the conventional and the radical, literature and science, politics and romance, but above all it gives us a vision of what lies within the human heart, the roar on the other side of silence. George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch is a microcosm of human interrelationships seen through the eyes of a single community. Often topping polls of reader’s favourite novels, Middlemarch is a vital and vibrant meditation on love, self-sacrifice, ambition and what it really means to make a difference in the world. ‘On the brink of adulthood—not knowing where I would study, where I might live, what men I would love, whether I would have children—I felt that everything I might need to know about marriage, about love, about life itself, was encompassed in the novel’s eight hundred and fifty pages.’ – Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker