Middlemarch (Penguin Classics S.) - Softcover

Eliot, George; Ashton, Rosemary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140433880 ISBN 13: 9780140433883

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1994

Synopsis

In a panoramic sweep of the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, George Eliot explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature: Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, idealistic but naive; Rosamund Vincy, beautiful and egoistic; Edward Casaubon, the dry-as-dust scholar; Tertius Lydgate, the brilliant but morally flawed physician; the passionate artist, Will Ladislaw; and Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, childhood sweethearts whose charming courtship is one of the many humorous elements in the novel's comic vein.

About this title

Review:

"No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative [...] I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot [...] No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully." - V. S. Pritchett "The 10 Greatest Books of All Time" - BBC's The Big Read

From the Publisher:

In Middlemarch George Eliot gives us a portrait of provincial life in Victorian England that has never been surpassed.

Wit, irony, pathos and brilliant insight into human nature colour every strand of plot and every beautifully drawn character. Foremost among these and Dorothea Booke, passionate to use her spirit and talent in a wider world than that typically afforded to women in the 1830s; Casuabon, the dry, jealous academic; Doctor Lydgate, who dreams of pioneering research in medical science; spoilt, pretty Rosamond Vincy who sees as 'a man whom it would be delightful to enslave'.

The novel centres on the marriages of Dorothea and of Lydgate, and on the web of relationships that connects us to each other. While eagerly awaiting the next part of the Middlemarch serial in 1872, the Spectator critic declared that 'Middlemarch bids more than fair to be one of the great books of the world'.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0140433880
• ISBN 13: 9780140433883
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 880