Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Middlemarch by George Eliot (real name: Mary Ann Evans), was first published in 1871. The novel is set in the fictitious English town of Middlemarch during 1829–1832, and follows several distinct, intersecting stories with a large cast of characters. It is one of Five Books’ most recommended books.
Recommendations from our site
“I think one does often turn to novelists to get a sense of other people’s lives. It was written in 1871, but it’s written about a period 40 or so years before, the period when Ada Lovelace flourished. It’s about an intelligent woman trapped by the expectations and the circumstances of the society she finds herself in.” Read more...
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Ursula Martin, Mathematician
“Middlemarch is staggeringly brilliant, but it’s a labour of love—it’ll take even the most diligent weeks to read…. It’s one thing to enjoy a book, and quite another to to cherish the time spent with a set of characters. I’m envious of anyone getting to know Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate, Mary Garth and Casaubon for the first time. If I could wipe my memory clean and go back and reread it fresh, I would.” Read more...
“I was in my early twenties and hungry for long, character-driven narratives. Dorothea Brooke was a wonder to me—Tolstoyan in her richness, truly good without a forced or irritating saintliness.” Read more...
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Esi Edugyan, Novelist
“Middlemarch is deeply ethical….It’s a great novel. Every time I re-read it I think, ‘Gee, I know this by heart. Am I going to have the full experience?’ And I always do: I always have the huge experience and find something else to admire in it.” Read more...
Rebecca Goldstein, Philosopher
“It’s like several novels in one…. The idea is that, while you read successively, the events being narrated happen simultaneously. It makes you appreciate that there are so many lives interconnected and separated going on at the same time in this little world. It’s only a provincial town, but it’s an image of the whole world.” Read more...
“Many people will be familiar with this book. The main story concerns a young woman named Dorothea who is hungry for an intellectually and spiritually expansive life but not sure how to secure it. Given the time she lives in, the early nineteenth century, her first thought is to marry the man who can teach her the most, and this leads her to an unfortunate marriage with the dry pedant Mr. Casaubon. Casaubon turns out to be not only an impoverished thinker but a rigid and small-souled person. Sterile scholarship can be just another form of self-deception. George Eliot was not only a great novelist but a fine philosopher. You feel, underneath the workings of the plot, a superb philosophical mind thinking things out in an original and moving way. The fact that her writing is moving, working us over with the artistry of the novelist, is essential to her conception.” Read more...
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Rebecca Goldstein, Philosopher
“Eliot is very good at showing how people act against their best interests because of subtle social pressures that lead them a certain way.” Read more...
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Emrys Westacott, Philosopher
“Eliot was absolutely determined to paint a serious, detailed picture of provincial life.” Read more...
Robert McCrum, Journalist
Mary Ann Evans, who went by the pen name George Eliot, was not only a great novelist but also a fine philosopher, as American philosopher Rebecca Goldstein put it in her interview with us on the best philosophical novels. Not surprisingly, Middlemarch has been recommended multiple times on Five Books, whether as one of the very best novels ever written in English, or as one of the most helpful books for insight into the ethical dilemmas and pressures of our daily lives. For these reasons, deputy editor Cal Flyn chose to publish it for the Five Books Essentials range, though it’s also long (800+ pages), so also quite a good one to read as an ebook for convenience purposes.
“It is not that her power diminishes, for, to our thinking, it is at its highest in the mature Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”
Virginia Woolf
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