Middlemarch

Middlemarch is a novel by the English writer George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, published in eight installments from December 1871 to December 1872 and set in the fictional English Midlands town of Middlemarch between 1829 and 1832, in the years leading up to the Reform Act of 1832. The novel weaves together several interlocking stories of provincial life, chiefly the idealistic Dorothea Brooke's disastrous marriage to the much older, self-absorbed scholar Edward Casaubon and her later attraction to his cousin Will Ladislaw; the ambitious young physician Tertius Lydgate's medical reforms and his own unhappy marriage to the vain Rosamond Vincy; and the more modest romance between Rosamond's brother Fred Vincy and the plain-spoken Mary Garth, alongside the moral exposure of the banker Nicholas Bulstrode. Eliot used this web of overlapping lives to examine the limits placed on women's ambitions, the compromises of marriage, the difficulty of genuine reform, both medical and political, and the gap between idealism and the ordinary constraints of provincial society. Though it received a mixed reception on first publication, Middlemarch came to be regarded as Eliot's masterpiece, and it is now consistently ranked among the greatest novels written in English for the psychological depth and moral seriousness of its portrait of a whole community.