Middlemarch: a study of provincial life

With new illustrations and a brilliant original introduction by New Yorker writer and author of My Life in Middlemarch Rebecca Mead, the Restless Classics edition of Middlemarch presents George Eliot's masterpiece of Victorian fiction in an appealing new light. Long regarded as one of the greatest of the great English-language novels, Middlemarch by George Eliot has endured as the archetypal Victorian novel and an eternally resonant exploration of society and the individual. Centuries removed from the world of the landed gentry in 1830s England, the characters of Middlemarch remain as exquisitely drawn and deeply alive as any in literature: the pedantic, obsessive Reverend Casaubon, the idealistic Dr. Lydgate, and the spirited, striving Dorothea Brooke. A novel of marriage, Eliot's "study of Provincial Life" is also a strikingly fresh commentary on scientific and technological change, cultural and class divides, and the upheavals of a rural community experiencing global transformation. In her insightful introduction, Rebecca Mead, New Yorker writer and author of My Year in Middlemarch, explores Eliot's "meliorism"-her belief that individuals can improve society in small, everyday ways. Dorothea's successes and failures not only in love but as an ardent social reformer will resonate with all of us who look at the world today and ask, as Dorothea did in her time, "What could she do, what ought she to do?" With bold illustrations by artist Keren Katz, the Restless Classics edition of Middlemarch is a thoroughly modern edition of one of the most important novels ever written.