'The most profound, wise and absorbing of English novels. In her introduction, Rosemary Ashton, biographer of George Eliot, discusses themes of change in Middlemarch, and examines the novel as an imaginative embodiment of Eliot's humanist beliefs. Middlemarch Penguin Random House Higher Education On April 10, 1994, PBS stations nationwide will air the first episode of a lavish six-part Masterpiece Theatre production of Eliots brilliant work, Middlemarch, hosted by Russell Baker and produced by Louis Marks. This edition uses the text of the second edition of 1874.

As their stories entwine, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.

Published over the course of 1871-72, the novel depicts the trials and tribulations of life in the small English town of Middlemarch. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career and the religious hypocrite Bulstode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. Middlemarch or Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is a Victorian realist novel by George Eliot (the penname of Mary Ann Evans).

George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. 'People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are'

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