Description

150th ANNIVERSARY GIFT EDITION WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ZADIE SMITH

Discover one of the most admired, best loved and influential novels in the history of English literature.

‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life…’

Dorothea is bright, beautiful and rebellious. Lydgate is the ambitious new doctor in town. Both of them long to make a positive difference in the world. But their stories do not proceed as expected and both they, and the other inhabitants of Middlemarch, must struggle to reconcile themselves to their fates and find their places in the world.

Middlemarch contains all of life: the rich and the poor, the conventional and the radical, literature and science, politics and romance, but above all it gives us a vision of what lies within the human heart.

VINTAGE CLASSICS 150th ANNIVERSARY GIFT EDITION
George Eliot’s novel was first published in eight instalments, in an innovative new style of serialisation. The earliest part, entitled MIDDLEMARCH, Book 1 – Miss Brooke, was published on 1st December 1871. It was an instant commercial and critical success, and continues to captivate readers 150 years later.

**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Publisher Review

Perhaps the greatest novel of them all... An enormous canvas and a vast and poignant range of character...a marvellous portrait of nineteenth-century provincial life -- Joanna Trollope * Guardian * In Middlemarch George Eliot's serious intelligence produced a novel that no one else could have been capable of - a picture of society as an organic, living, breathing synthesis - order and disorder, hope and hopelessness, pride and humility, charity and greed -- Kate Atkinson Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people -- Virginia Woolf Another great romantic story, in which the adorable intellectually pretentious heroine makes a disastrous marriage to a desiccated fossil before finding true love with a penniless somebody -- Jilly Cooper She had such power, and she knew she had. And such courage -- A. S. Byatt * Guardian *