Since its first appearance in 1871-2, Middlemarch has been hailed by successive generations of writers and readers for its authentic view of life in a small English town in the run-up to the Reform Bill of 1832. Addressing such themes as marriage, religion, hypocrisy and political reform, Middlemarch follows the relationships of various couples and their success or failure, placing the position of women in society at the centre of the work. In 2007, an author poll conducted by Time Magazine placed the novel as one of the 10 greatest ever written.

Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.Henry James described Middlemarch as a ‘treasurehouse of detail’ while Virginia Woolf famously endorsed George Eliot’s masterpiece as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.