Middlemarch

A Midland town in the years before the Reform Act of 1832: Dorothea Brooke marries a dry scholar and regrets it; the new doctor Lydgate marries a pretty woman and is ruined; a banker’s past returns. George Eliot published the novel in eight parts from 1871. It is commonly called the greatest novel in English.

Its subject is what becomes of large intentions in a place too small for them, and Eliot refuses to let any of the four or five plots stand clear of the others: a vote at the hospital board, a debt, a piece of gossip in a shop, and three households have changed. The Prelude and the Finale frame the whole as the life of an obscure saint.

The eight books are given complete, with the dedication to George Henry Lewes, the Prelude and the Finale.