Middlemarch, Paperback/George Eliot (85b563ec-40e4-4804-97fe-6542b6bef9d8)

One of the most accomplished and prominent novels of the Victorian era, Middlemarch is an unsurpassed portrait of nineteenth-century English provincial life. Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of fervent ideals who yearns to effect social change yet faces resistance from the society she inhabits. In this epic in a small landscape, Eliot's large cast of precisely delineated characters and the rich tapestry of their stories result in a wise, compassionate, and astute vision of human nature. As Virginia Woolf declared, George Eliot ``was one of the first English novelists to discover that men and women think as well as feel, and the discovery was of great artistic moment.