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Taking place in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Middlemarch explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature: Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, idealistic but naive; Rosamond Vincy, beautiful and egoistic: Edward Casaubon, the dry-as-dust scholar: Tertius Lydgate, the brilliant but morally-flawed physician: the passionate artist Will Ladislaw: and Fred Vincey and Mary Garth, childhood sweethearts whose charming courtship is one of the many humorous elements in the novel's rich comic vein.
About the author
George Eliot was born in Nuneaton on 22nd November 1819. Baptized Mary Anne Evans, Eliot chose to write using a male pen name. She was sent away to school but returned when her mother died in 1836.She later moved to Coventry with her father.After her father's death she became the Assistant Editor of the Westminster Review in 1851. She also met George Henry Lewes this year and they became partners for the rest of his life. Lewes was already married, although he and his wife both considered their relationship to be an open one, but he and Eliot set up home together, much to the dismay of polite London society.
In 1857 Eliot published Amos Barton in Blackwood's Magazine and in 1859 her novel Adam Bede was published to great acclaim.Her first attempt to write Middlemarch, her most famous novel, ended in failure. Abandoning it, she began a short novella entitled Miss Brooke which was eventually integrated into the final version of Middlemarch. The novel was published serially in eight parts in 1871. Lewes died in 1878 and Eliot married again in 1880. Her husband, John Walter Cross was an American who was twenty years her junior. George Eliot died on 22nd December 1880 at 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea and is buried in Highgate Cemetery next to Lewes.
Summary
150th ANNIVERSARY GIFT EDITION WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ZADIE SMITH
Discover one of the most admired, best loved and influential novels in the history of English literature. The perfect long read this Christmas.
'If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life...'
Dorothea is bright, beautiful and rebellious. Lydgate is the ambitious new doctor in town. Both of them long to make a positive difference in the world. But their stories do not proceed as expected and both they, and the other inhabitants of Middlemarch, must struggle to reconcile themselves to their fates and find their places in the world.
Middlemarch contains all of life: the rich and the poor, the conventional and the radical, literature and science, politics and romance, but above all it gives us a vision of what lies within the human heart.
VINTAGE CLASSICS 150th ANNIVERSARY GIFT EDITION
George Eliot's novel was first published in eight instalments, in an innovative new style of serialisation. The earliest part, entitled MIDDLEMARCH, Book 1 - Miss Brooke, was published on 1st December 1871. It was an instant commercial and critical success, and continues to captivate readers 150 years later.
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
