Middlemarch

Middlemarch by George Eliot, published in 1871–72, is a realist masterpiece set in a provincial English town during the late 1820s and early 1830s, weaving together the lives of its diverse inhabitants amid social changes like electoral reform and railway expansion. At its heart are two idealists: Dorothea Brooke, a passionate young woman who marries the elderly scholar Edward Casaubon hoping to join his futile quest for The Key to All Mythologies, only to face disillusionment; and Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious doctor whose medical reforms and marriage to the materialistic Rosamond Vincy lead to compromise and debt. The novel explores themes of thwarted ambition, moral complexity, marriage’s pitfalls, and the clash between personal dreams and societal constraints, creating a panoramic study of provincial life with richly human characters.