Description

Dorothea Brooke longs to do good, but marriage, ambition and provincial gossip test her every intention.

This Vintage Classics 150th anniversary gift edition, with an introduction by Zadie Smith, celebrates one of the most admired novels in English literature.

Dorothea Brooke is intelligent, idealistic and hungry for a meaningful life. Tertius Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch with medical ambition and reforming zeal. Around them, marriages, inheritances, debts, politics, gossip and moral compromise bind a whole provincial community together.

George Eliot explores love, disillusionment, scandal and private goodness with unmatched sympathy and intelligence.

First published in instalments from 1871, Middlemarch remains a profound novel about marriage, ambition, reform, religion, science and the hidden influence one life can have on another.

One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World, this edition is a beautiful classic gift for readers seeking Victorian fiction, literary classics and one of the great studies of the human heart.

**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Publisher Review

Perhaps the greatest novel of them all... An enormous canvas and a vast and poignant range of character...a marvellous portrait of nineteenth-century provincial life -- Joanna Trollope * Guardian * In Middlemarch George Eliot's serious intelligence produced a novel that no one else could have been capable of - a picture of society as an organic, living, breathing synthesis - order and disorder, hope and hopelessness, pride and humility, charity and greed -- Kate Atkinson Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people -- Virginia Woolf Another great romantic story, in which the adorable intellectually pretentious heroine makes a disastrous marriage to a desiccated fossil before finding true love with a penniless somebody -- Jilly Cooper She had such power, and she knew she had. And such courage -- A. S. Byatt * Guardian *