Middlemarch: A Study Of Provincial Life

By (author) George Eliot
“You are a good young man,” she said. “But I do not like husbands. I will never have another.” British novelist George Eliot (pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans) painted a rich and vivid portrait of a small 19th-century town in her acclaimed novel, Middlemarch. Published in eight parts in 1871–72 and also published in four volumes in 1872, Eliot’s magnum opus delves into the lives of people belonging to various classes in Middlemarch—the landed gentry, clergy, farmers, labourers, and professionals. The narrative revolves around two central characters—Dorothea Brooke, an intelligent woman who marries the wrong man, and Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious, progressive doctor who also makes a costly mistake when choosing a mate. Eliot refused to bow to the dictates of tradition and ended her novel on a happy note as women writers of the time were expected to do. Rich in insight and layered with moral ambiguity, Middlemarch boldly lays bare the reality of matrimony.This quintessentially modern novel was hailed by pioneering modernist author Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”