Middlemarch

Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by the English writer George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. It appeared in eight instalments between December 1871 and December 1872, with a four-volume book edition published alongside them.

The book is set in a fictional town in the English Midlands between 1829 and 1832, and it follows several interlocking stories rather than a single one. Dorothea Brooke is a serious young woman with a desire to do something with her life, which in her position means either marrying well or doing good works, and she chooses marriage to an older scholar in the belief that assisting his research will be a form of purpose. Tertius Lydgate is a young physician who comes to Middlemarch with professional ambitions, plans for a hospital and a set of ideas about medical practice that the town is not ready for. Around them are the bankers, clergymen, landowners and relatives whose opinions decide what is possible, and whose own fortunes are bound up with the Reform Bill, the arrival of the railways and the changing value of land.

Eliot wrote the novel as a study of an ordinary community rather than of great events, and her interest is in how large intentions are worn down or sustained by the small decisions of daily life.