Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life: 2 (Oxford World's Classics) - Hardcover

Eliot, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0192100297 ISBN 13: 9780192100290

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999

Synopsis

The first World's Classics were introduced by some of the greatest writers of their day, including Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene and T.S. Eliot. In these hardback editions, contemporary novelists including A.S. Byatt and Joyce Carol Oates introduce their favourite classics in original pocketbook size. Echoing the original World's Classics series, the books are produced to gift-book standard with stitched binding, head and tail bands, printed on 60msg paper and featuring matt laminated jackets in a "retro-look" design. Writing at the moment when the foundations of Western thought were being challenged, George Eliot fashions in "Middlemarch" (1871-2) the quintessential Victorian novel; a concept of life and society free from the dogma of the past yet able to confront the scepticism that was taking over the age.

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: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0192100297
• ISBN 13: 9780192100290
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 944