A highly emotional yet exciting book is one that you may not have read but it has topped the list of BBC’s 100 greatest British novels. Published in eight parts from 1871 to 1872, Middlemarch is considered to be George Eliot’s masterpiece. George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans who used a male pseudonym to ensure her works were taken seriously in an era when female authors were usually associated with romantic novels.
Middlemarch is a realist work which is a study of class of society, from the landed gentry and clergy to the manufacturers and professional men, farmers, and labourers. One reviewer on Goodreads said: “The end will leave you teetering on the brink, revisiting all of your personal, deep-seated assumptions about people, what is a successful life, what is a good marriage, how you measure goodness and your impact on others’ lives.”
George Eliot’s novel is an evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community.
The novel follows Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless 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.
As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”.
The novel has been adapted to the screen with one of the most popular adaptations being the 1994 TV mini-series.
Starring Douglas Hodge, Juliet Aubrey and Trevyn McDowell, the series received a 7.5 out of 10 rating on IMDb.
One reviewer posted: “Of all of George Eliot’s novels, all of which are at least worth reading, Middlemarch gets my vote for personal favourite.
“It’s an incredibly rich story in detail and emotion and the characters are human and complex, though some like Casaubon are purposefully not very likable.
“And what a brilliant adaptation this is, even better than 2002’s Daniel Deronda and that was fabulous as well.
“Both share the same virtues but 1994’s Middlemarch for me is superior because the ending is far more satisfying (if not as bleak as the source material).”