George Eliot

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is exactly what it claims. Its multiple plots center around the inhabitants of a fictitious Midlands town and their evolving relationships to each other. It is critical of social class, ambition and marriage, and religion. It is commonly considered one of the masterpieces of English writing, and Virginia Woolf described it as "the magnificent book that, with all its imperfections, is one of the few

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"Instead of choosing to wed a wealthy landowner and settle for a comfortable life, Dorothea Brooke decides to marry Edward Casaubon -- a dull scholar who is her senior by a few decades. Dorothea hopes the union will afford her with the opportunity to share in her husband's intellectual pursuits, but even her best efforts can't save the disastrous marriage. Meanwhile, idealistic doctor Tertius Lydgate has progressive ideas about the medical field,...

"'Many men write well and tell a story well, but few possess the art of giving individuality to their characters so happily and easily as you ... '" "Thus wrote the publisher John Blackwood in February 1857 to a shy and ambitious new author, whom he had not yet met, George Eliot. Shielded by this pseudonym, Mary Ann Evans made her fictional debut when Scenes of Clerical Life appeared in Blackwood's Magazine the same year. These stories contain Eliot's...

Adam Bede, an honest, hard-working carpenter, has his heart set on marrying his sweetheart, pretty dairymaid Hetty Sorrel. Hetty wants nothing to do with her boring life on the farm and she allows herself to be seduced by the heir to a local estate. She finds herself abandoned and pregnant from her ill-fated dalliance.