George Eliot

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Middlemarch, in full Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, novel by George Eliot (pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans), published in eight parts in 1871-72 and also published in four volumes in 1872. It is considered to be Eliot's masterpiece. The realist work is a study of every class of society in the town of Middlemarch-from the landed gentry and clergy to the manufacturers and professional men, farmers, and labourers. The focus, however, is on the thwarted idealism of its two principal characters, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, both of whom marry disastrously.