Middlemarch (Everyman's Library)

The multiple plots of Middlemarch (1871-2) center on idealist Dorothea Brooke, whose aspirations to a deep spiritual life leads to her disillusioning marriage with the elderly Mr. Casaubon. In town, the life of the young doctor Lydgate and his shallow wife Rosamund mirrors her disappointments. Eliot's ingenious analysis of nineteenth century social experience refuses to comfort either the complacent or those who live according to their ethics; her novel is a masterpiece of style and a milestone in the exodus of the narrator into the twentieth century.