Middlemarch: George Eliot (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Eliot, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141439548 ISBN 13: 9780141439549

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2003

Synopsis

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'

'One of the few English novels written for grown-up people' Virginia Woolf

George Eliot's nuanced and moving novel is a masterly evocation of connected lives, changing fortunes and human frailties in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past.

Edited with an Introduction and notes by ROSEMARY ASHTON

About this title

Review:

"One of the few English novels written for grown-up people" -- Virginia Woolf

"The most profound, wise and absorbing of English novels...and, above all, truthful and forgiving about human behavior." -- Hermione Lee

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: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0141439548
• ISBN 13: 9780141439549
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 880
• Editor: Ashton Rosemary