Dorothea Brooke is a beautiful and idealistic young woman set on filling her life with good deeds. She pursues the pompous Edward Casaubon, conviced that he embodies these principles, and becomes trapped in an unhappy marriage. Then there is Tertius Lydgate, an anguished progressive whose determination to bring modern medicine to the provinces is muddied by unrequited love. They, and a multitude of other brilliantly drawn characters, reside in the town Middlemarch - the background to George Eliot's incomparable portrait of Victorian life.

A masterpiece of candid observation, emotional insight and humour, Middlemarch is a truly monumental novel.

With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan.