Middlemarch

“I know Middlemarch is 800 pages. I get it. That said, it is the most exquisite English novel about community. George Eliot forever.” —Min Jin Lee, Elle “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“In these outraged, internet-addled times, there’s perhaps nothing more noble and community affirming than discussing a thick 19th-century novel about rural England with a group of fellow readers… . Middlemarch would be the perfect pick for a slow-reading book club… . You’ll want to take your time dissecting its fascinating cast of characters: the sincere and the bitter, the blowhards and the tenderhearted. By the sage grace of her omniscient narrator, Eliot depicts the full complexity of these lives—and, by the magic of fiction, our own… . There’s a wisdom bomb on nearly every page.” —Los Angeles Times, “101 Best Book Club Picks for Every Type of Reader”

George Eliot (1819-1880), whose real name was Mary Ann Evans Cross, left school at the age of sixteen and embarked on a program of independent study to further her intellectual growth before becoming one of the leading novelists of the Victorian era. Her seven novels also include The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, and Silas Marner.

Rebecca Mead is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of My Life in Middlemarch. She lives in New York.

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