Middlemarch

george eliot megan mcdaniel lynne sharon schwartz

Often called the greatest nineteenth-century British novelist, George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) created in Middlemarch a vast panorama of life in a provincial Midlands town. At the story’s center stands the intellectual and idealistic Dorothea Brooke—a character who in many ways resembles Eliot herself. But the very qualities that set Dorothea apart from the materialistic, mean-spirited society around her also lead her into a disastrous marriage with a man she mistakes for her soul mate. In a parallel story, young doctor Tertius Lydgate, who is equally idealistic, falls in love with the pretty but vain and superficial Rosamund Vincy, whom he marries to his ruin.Eliot surrounds her main figures with a gallery of characters drawn from every social class, from laborers and shopkeepers to the rising middle class to members of the wealthy, landed gentry. Together they form an extraordinarily rich and precisely detailed portrait of English provincial life in the 1830s. But Dorothea’s and Lydgate’s struggles to retain their moral integrity in the midst of temptation and tragedy remind us that their world is very much like our own. Strikingly modern in its painful ironies and psychological insight, Middlemarch was pivotal in the shaping of twentieth-century literary realism.

Middlemarch, by George Eliot, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of fourteen books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, including the novels Disturbances in the Field, Leaving Brooklyn, and In the Family Way, and the memoir Ruined by Reading. Her poetry collection In Solitary and her translation of A Place to Live: Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg appeared in 2002.

Genres classicsfictionhistorical fictionliterature19th centuryvictoriannovelsaudiobookromancebritish literature

848 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1872

Series

Reclaim Her Name

Places

midlands england, england, west midlands england,

This edition

Format: 848 pages, Paperback
Published: April 1, 2003 by Barnes \u0026 Noble
ISBN: 9781593080235
ASIN: 1593080239
Language: English

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About the author

george eliot

Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.
Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.