George Eliot's Victorian masterpiece: a
magnificent portrait of a provincial town and its inhabitants
George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life,
explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of modern
changes. The proposed Reform Bill promises political change; the building of
railroads alters both the physical and cultural landscape; new scientific
approaches to medicine incite public division; and scandal lurks behind
respectability. The quiet drama of ordinary lives and flawed choices are played
out in the complexly portrayed central characters of the novel―the idealistic
Dorothea Brooke; the ambitious Dr. Lydgate; the spendthrift Fred Vincy; and the
steadfast Mary Garth. The appearance of two outsiders further disrupts the
town’s equilibrium―Will Ladislaw, the spirited nephew of Dorothea’s husband,
the Rev. Edward Casaubon, and the sinister John Raffles, who threatens to expose
the hidden past of one of the town’s elite. Middlemarch displays
George Eliot’s clear-eyed yet humane understanding of characters caught up in
the mysterious unfolding of self-knowledge. This Penguin Classics edition
uses the second edition of 1874 and features an introduction and notes by
Eliot-biographer Rosemary Ashton. In her introduction, Ashton discusses themes
of social change in Middlemarch, and examines the novel as an
imaginative embodiment of Eliot's humanist beliefs.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of
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by award-winning translators.
About the Author
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans Cross) was born on
November 22, 1819 at Arbury Farm, Warwickshire, England. She received an
ordinary education and, upon leaving school at the age of sixteen, embarked on
a program of independent study to further her intellectual growth. In 1841 she
moved with her father to Coventry, where the influences of “skeptics and
rationalists” swayed her from an intense religious devoutness to an eventual
break with the church. The death of her father in 1849 left her with a small
legacy and the freedom to pursue her literary inclinations. In 1851 she became
the assistant editor of the Westminster Review, a position she held
for three years. In 1854 came the fated meeting with George Henry Lewes, the
gifted editor of The Leader, who was to become her adviser and
companion for the next twenty-four years. Her first book, Scenes of a
Clerical Life (1858), was followed by Adam Bede (1859), The
Mill on the Floss (1860),Silas Marner (1861), and Middlemarch (1872).
The death of Lewes, in 1878, left her stricken and lonely. On May 6, 1880, she
married John Cross, a friend of long standing, and after a brief illness she
died on December 22 of that year, in London.
Rosemary Ashton, Professor of English Literature at University College,
London, is the editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Middlemarch.
