Middlemarch
A young woman marries a dry scholar in the hope of sharing a great work, and finds that he is merely pedantic. Around her, a town full of doctors, clergymen, bankers and farmers goes about its business, and Eliot follows several of them with the same patience she gives her heroine.
The novel is often described as the greatest English novel of provincial life, but its real ambition is to show how many lives are happening at once. The famous final paragraph about unhistoric acts is not a consolation prize; it is the book's argument. Read it slowly, and do not skip the political chapters.
Public-domain status
First published in 1871. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; George Eliot died in 1880, so this work has been free to republish there since 1951.
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