Middlemarch (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
It seems there's nothing that hasn't been said already about George Eliot's masterpiece. So I'll add only that because it's about the desires of the human heart, it is as relevant today as it was in the 1860s when Eliot wrote it. There was much upheaval at the time--changing technology in farming, a shifting political landscape--that has parallels to contemporary life, but it's the relationships that keep this book timeless. It's a book about hope and disappointment, about living in a small town where everyone knows your business, about making mistakes and learning from them, about underestimating and overestimating other people, about learning to discern your own feelings...and so much more. All entirely relatable. There's something to take away from 'Middlemarch' at each stage of your life, and every time you read it. To me, that's the mark of a classic.
— ClaraWith Lewes’s encouragement, Mary Ann Evans wrote her first fictional work, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” for Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857; it was followed by two more stories published under the pseudonym George Elliot–“George” because it was Lewes’s name and “Eliot” because, she said, it was good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.” At the age of thirty-nine she used her memories of Warwickshire to write her first long novel, Adam Bede (1859), a book that established her as the foremost woman novelist in her day. Then came The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Romola (1863). Her masterpiece and one of the greatest English novels, Middlemarch, was published in 1871-72. Her last work was Daniel Deronda (1876). After Lewes’s death George Eliot married John Walter Cross. He was forty; she was sixty-one. Before her death on December 22, 1880, she had been recognized by her contemporaries as the greatest living writer of English fiction.
--V. S. Pritchett