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  • Published: 1 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781407066066
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 928

Middlemarch




Vintage Classics brings you one of the most admired, best loved and most influential novels in the history of English literature


Discover one of the most admired, best loved and influential novels in the history of English literature. The perfect long read to lose yourself in.

'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, the roar on the other side of silence.

**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

  • Published: 1 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781407066066
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 928

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About the author

George Eliot

Mary Ann (Marian) Evans was born in 1819 in Warwickshire. She attended schools in Nuneaton and Coventry, coming under the influence of evangelical teachers and clergymen. In 1836 her mother died and Marian became her father's housekeeper, educating herself in her spare time. In 1841 she moved to Coventry, and met Charles and Caroline Bray, local progressive intellectuals. Through them she was commissioned to translate Strauss's Life of Jesus and met the radical publisher John Chapman, who, when he purchased the Westminster Review in 1851, made her his managing editor.

Having lost her Christian faith and thereby alienated her family, she moved to London and met Herbert Spencer (whom she nearly married, only he found her too 'morbidly intellectual') and the versatile man-of-letters George Henry Lewes. Lewes was separated from his wife, but with no possibility of divorce. In 1854 he and Marian decided to live together, and did so until Lewes's death in 1878. It was he who encouraged her to turn from philosophy and journalism to fiction, and during those years, under the name of George Eliot, she wrote Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, as well as numerous essays, articles and reviews.

George Eliot died in 1880, only a few months after marrying J. W. Cross, an old friend and admirer, who became her first biographer. She was buried beside Lewes at Highgate. George Eliot combined a formidable intelligence with imaginative sympathy and acute powers of observation, and became one of the greatest and most influential of English novelists. Her choice of material widened the horizons of the novel and her psychological insights radically influenced the novelist's approach to characterization. Middlemarch, considered by most to be her masterpiece, was said by Virginia Woolf to be 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.

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Praise for Middlemarch

Perhaps the greatest novel of them all... An enormous canvas and a vast and poignant range of character...a marvellous portrait of nineteenth-century provincial life

Joanna Trollope

Another great romantic story, in which the adorable intellectually pretentious heroine makes a disastrous marriage to a desiccated fossil before finding true love with a penniless somebody

Jilly Cooper

In Middlemarch George Eliot's serious intelligence produced a novel that no one else could have been capable of - a picture of society as an organic, living, breathing synthesis - order and disorder, hope and hopelessness, pride and humility, charity and greed.

Kate Atkinson