Middlemarch - George Eliot

George Eliot’s poised vision, her compassion and her cool flow of ironic comment are at their most compelling in this masterpiece.

With sure and subtle touch, George Eliot paints a luminous and spacious landscape of life in a provincial town, interweaving her themes with a proliferation of characters:
Dorothea, an innocent idealist hemmed in by a social life that seemed nothing more than a labyrinth of petty causes; Dr Lydgate, the young doctor, defeated by self and circumstance; Rosamond, who possesses the naïve but deadly egoism of the spoilt child; the chill and impotent Casaubon who lives ‘too much with the dead’; and Bulstrode, who chokes his conscience with doctrinal justification. Indeed, in her penetrating analysis of human nature George Eliot achieved what Dr Leavis called ‘a Tolstoyan depth and reality’.