Since the date of its first publication, in 1871-72, Middlemarch has been recognized as one of the great" English novels, written in what was later to be called "the Great Tradition." Its very title has a confident centrality. Middlemarch--there it stands, in the middle of the maintstream of English fiction (yet not without a hint.of progress in its'second syllable), as the provincial town it portrays stands in the middle of England and English history, in the Midlands that George Eliot had "learned by heart standing between [her] father's knees while he drove leisurely." (page 93).It has a breadth and spaciousness remarkable even for anage of long novels, and its parioramic view of social life remains unsurpassed...

Few novelists have ever attempted so broad a canvas as George Eliot in her masterpiece, Middlemarch.Portraying every level of social life in a provincial Midlands town called Middlemarch, she interweaves several intensely dramatic stories of love and death, betrayal and reconciliation, into one of the finest pictures of nineteenth-century England ever created. Its acute psychological penetration makes it also an exceptionally modern work, particularly in the romantic idealism of Dorothea Brooke, who often resembles George Eliot herself, and in the disastrous marriage and thwarted career of the young reformist doctor, Lydgate. Virginia Woolf called it "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people"-and it is truly great literature that ranks among the best novels in the world.

Introduction by Margaret Drabble

A Note on the Text

Prelude

Book One MISS BROOKE

Book Two-OLD AND YOUNG

Book Three--WAITING FOR DEATH

Book Four---THREE LOVE PROBLEMS

Book Five---THE DEAD HAND

Book Six---THE WIDOW AND THE WIFE

Book Seven---TWO TEMPTATIONS

Book Eight---SUNSET AND SUNRISE

Finale

Afterword by Jerome Beaty

Notes

Selected Bibliography