Middlemarch

One of the BBC''s ''100 Novels That Shaped Our World'' ''One of the few English novels written for grown-up people'' Virginia Woolf George Eliot''s nuanced and moving novel is a masterly evocation of connected lives, changing fortunes and human frailties in a provincial community. 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; 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 Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. Edited with an Introduction and notes by ROSEMARY ASHTON