Middlemarch

George Eliot's masterpiece — widely regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written in English. In the fictional town of Middlemarch, idealistic Dorothea Brooke marries the aging scholar Edward Casaubon, hoping to devote her life to a great purpose — only to find herself trapped in a loveless, stifling union. Meanwhile, the ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate arrives with grand plans for medical reform, and finds his own dreams eroded by debt and a disastrous marriage. Weaving together the lives of dozens of Middlemarch's residents — bankers, clergymen, farmers, and reformers — Eliot builds an extraordinarily rich portrait of English provincial life on the eve of the 1832 Reform Act. With unmatched psychological insight and quiet, devastating irony, Middlemarch examines idealism crushed by circumstance, the compromises of marriage, and the slow, unglamorous heroism of ordinary lives. Ranked among the greatest novels in the English language by critics from Virginia Woolf to Martin Amis A sweeping web of interconnected lives and destinies Essential reading for lovers of Austen, the Brontës, and Tolstoy