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  • Published: 29 October 2015
  • ISBN: 9780143107729
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 800
  • RRP: $55.00

Middlemarch




The new paperback series: Penguin English Library

George Eliot’s beloved masterpiece in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with a foreword by Rebecca Mead, author of the bestselling memoir My Life in Middlemarch
 
A triumph of realist fiction, George Eliot’s Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of sweeping change. The proposed Reform Bill, the new railroads, and scientific advances are threatening upheaval on every front. Against this backdrop, the quiet drama of ordinary lives is played out by the novel’s complexly portrayed characters—until the arrival of two outsiders further disrupts the town’s equilibrium. Every bit as powerful and perceptive in our time as it was in the Victorian era, Middlemarch displays George Eliot’s clear-eyed yet humane understanding of characters caught up in the mysterious unfolding of self-knowledge. 

In this elegant Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, Rebecca Mead introduces the novel that shaped her life and reflects on its joys and its timeless relevance.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

  • Published: 29 October 2015
  • ISBN: 9780143107729
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 800
  • RRP: $55.00

Other books in the series

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A Dog's Heart
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
Selected Poetry
On Sparta
Man and Superman
Saint Joan
Botchan
Military Dispatches

About the author

George Eliot

George Eliot was born Mary Anne Evans in Chilvers Coton, England in 1819 on an estate managed by her father. When her mother did she left school to run the household, continuing her education alone in the estate’s library. She was multi-lingual and steeped in classical literature by the time a series of her essays and translations led to an invitation to London to edit the prestigious Westminster Review—anonymously, for fear a female editor would put off readers. When nearly 40 she published the story collection Scenes of Clerical Life, under the pseudonym George Eliot, partly because she was living with a married man, radical publisher George Henry Lewes, and feared being shunned by the public. Bu tin 1849 her fist novel Adam Bede, with its startling realism and psychologically astute characterizations, caused a sensation—and prompted an imposter to claim authorship. Evans revealed herself and was indeed ostracized, although less so with each successful new book, from The Mill on the Floss to Silas Marner and Middlemarch. After 25 years together Lewes died and, still grieving, she married their banker, a man 20 years her junior. She died shortly thereafter in 1880.

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Praise for Middlemarch

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” —Virginia Woolf “The most profound, wise and absorbing of English novels . . . and, above all, truthful and forgiving about human behaviour.” —Hermione Lee "No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative...I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot...No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully". —V. S. Pritchett "Middlemarch is probably the greatest English novel." —Julian Barnes "It is possible to argue that Middlemarch is the greatest English novel." —A. S. Byatt  "Certainly the greatest [English] novel." —Martin Amis