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Middlemarch

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What to expect

Dorothea Brooke is a thoughtful and idealistic young woman determined to make a difference with her life. Enamored of a man whom she believes is setting this example, she unwittingly traps herself into a loveless marriage.

Her parallel is Tertius Lydgate, a visionary young doctor from the city, whose passionate ambition to spread the new science of medicine is complicated by his love for the wrong woman.

Featuring a panoply of complex, brilliantly drawn characters from every walk of life, George Eliot's masterpiece is a rich and teeming portrait of provincial life in Victorian England. Yet her characters' struggles to retain their moral integrity in the midst of temptation and tragedy are strikingly modern in their painful ironies.

The incomparable psychological insight of Middlemarch was pivotal in the shaping of twentieth-century literary realism.

Critics Review

“One of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

Virginia Woolf

“[Wanda McCaddon] makes [Middlemarch] come alive. She is in wonderful form as she slides from character to character, giving them their distinctiveness through intonation and pacing. [McCaddon’s] voice is that of the genteel British woman, and it’s the perfect thing for Eliot.”

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Library Journal

“The novel is an image of a society, political, agricultural, aristocratic, plebeian, religious, scientific…It is a microcosm, local but also universal.”

A. S. Byatt, New York Times bestselling author

“An author whose novels it has really been a liberal education to read.”

The Atlantic

“One of the most profound, wise, and absorbing of English novels…Above all, truthful and forgiving about human behavior.”

Hermione Lee, British biographer, literary critic, and former professor of English at the University of Oxford

“No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative….No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully.”

V. S. Pritchett, acclaimed short-story writer and literary critic
Author George Eliot
Narrator Nadia May
Duration 31 hours and 43 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781483088167
Format Audiobook
Publisher Craig Black
Genre Classic fiction, Fiction: general and literary, Historical fiction
Availability AU, GB, IE, US

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