The novel is set against the backdrop of political do-gooding: the great British reforms of the late 1820s and early 1830s, which greatly expanded the number of Englishmen (not women, of course) who could vote. The attempt is portrayed as difficult, almost killing at times, and many of the characters fail at it spectacularly. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that this particular novel, more even than Eliot’s others, is all about people trying to be good-out of religious belief or a desire to improve the lot of the common man or the love of a woman or in expiation of past badness.

But Eliot’s wonderful narrator appears in her other great books as well- Daniel Deronda and Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner-so why is Middlemarch my best beloved?

She can be extremely funny at times, a fact often overlooked by impatient readers. I love Eliot’s gently intrusive narrator, her aphoristic habit of mind, her asides on medical research and philanthropy and manners.

I love Middlemarch, published in 1872, for many reasons. I’ve read it twice since then, which might not seem like a lot for a favorite book, but it is nine hundred pages long, and its richness holds me for many years at a time. View our full collection of podcasts at our website: George Eliot’s Middlemarch has been my favorite novel ever since one summer nearly thirty years ago, when I read it on the recommendation of a Victorian literature–obsessed college friend. The pace is leisurely, the tone is mildly didactic (with an authorial voice that occasionally bursts through the narrative), and the canvas is very broad. It has multiple plots with a large cast of characters, and in addition to its distinct though interlocking narratives it pursues a number of underlying themes, including the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism and self-interest, religion and hypocrisy, political reform, and education. Subtitled 'A Study of Provincial Life,' the novel is set in the fictitious Midlands town of Middlemarch during the period 1830–32. The first one-volume edition was published in 1874, and attracted large sales. During the following year Eliot resumed work, fusing together several stories into a coherent whole, and during 1871–72 the novel appeared in serial form. It is her seventh novel, begun in 1869 and then put aside during the final illness of Thornton Lewes, the son of her companion George Henry Lewes. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, later Marian Evans.

Middlemarch by george eliot