George Eliot's Victorian masterpiece: a magnificent portrait of a provincial town and its
inhabitants George Eliot's novel Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life explores a fictional
nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of modern changes. The proposed Reform Bill
promises political change the building of railroads alters both the physical and cultural
landscape new scientific approaches to medicine incite public division and scandal lurks
behind respectability. The quiet drama of ordinary lives and flawed choices are played out in
the complexly portrayed central characters of the novel-the idealistic Dorothea Brooke the
ambitious Dr. Lydgate the spendthrift Fred Vincy and the steadfast Mary Garth. The appearance
of two outsiders further disrupts the town's equilibrium-Will Ladislaw the spirited nephew of
Dorothea's husband the Rev. Edward Casaubon and the sinister John Raffles who threatens to
expose the hidden past of one of the town's elite. Middlemarch displays George Eliot's
clear-eyed yet humane understanding of characters caught up in the mysterious unfolding of
self-knowledge. This Penguin Classics edition uses the second edition of 1874 and features an
introduction and notes by Eliot-biographer Rosemary Ashton. In her introduction Ashton
discusses themes of social change in Middlemarch and examines the novel as an imaginative
embodiment of Eliot's humanist beliefs. 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.
