About the Book: Middlemarch
George Eliots masterpiece, groundbreaking in its psychological insight into
powerful clashes of obligation and desire, Middlemarch is edited with notes and
an introduction by Rosemary Ashton in Penguin Classics. George Eliots most
ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes
in a provincial English community prior to the Reform Bill of 1832. Peopling its
landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual
fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar
Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the
spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine
his career; passionate,