Few novelists have ever attempted so broad a canvas as George Eliot in her masterpiece, Middlemarch . Portraying every level of social life in a provincial Midlands town called Middlemarch, she interweaves several intensely dramatic stories of love and death, betrayal and reconciliation, into one of the finest pictures of nineteenth-century England ever created. Its acute psychological penetration also makes it an exceptionally modern work, particularly in the romantic idealism of Dorothea Brooke, who often resembles George E liot herself, and in the disastrous marriage and thwarted career of the young reformist doctor, Lydgate. Virginia Woolf called it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”—and it is truly great literature that ranks among the best novels in the world.