Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (Vintage Classics) - Softcover

Eliot, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099516233 ISBN 13: 9780099516231

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2007

Synopsis

Discover one of the most admired, best loved and influential novels in the history of English literature.

‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life...’

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 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 the 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.

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

About this title

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"

"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."

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: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0099516233
• ISBN 13: 9780099516231
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 928