Middlemarch
Penguin Classics · first published 1871 · 880 pages
Life in a provincial English town around 1830, seen through several marriages, ambitions and quiet disappointments.
It moves slowly and generously, stepping into one mind after another with patience and a dry sense of humor.
For a night with nowhere to be.
About this book
Dorothea Brooke is earnest and longs to do some great good, and she marries an older scholar hoping to serve his work. In the same town, a young doctor named Lydgate arrives with plans to reform medicine, and finds that money and local opinion have plans of their own. Around them gather bankers, farmers, clergymen and relatives, each pursuing a private hope. The novel leaves a feeling of how ordinary lives add up to something larger.