Middlemarch

Description

George Eliot's beloved masterpiece in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with a foreword by Rebecca Mead, author of the bestselling memoir My Life in Middlemarch A triumph of realist fiction, George Eliot's Middlemarch- A Study of Provincial Life explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of sweeping change. The proposed Reform Bill, the new railroads, and scientific advances are threatening upheaval on every front. Against this backdrop, the quiet drama of ordinary lives is played out by the novel's complexly portrayed characters-until the arrival of two outsiders further disrupts the town's equilibrium. Every bit as powerful and perceptive in our time as it was in the Victorian era, Middlemarchdisplays George Eliot's clear-eyed yet humane understanding of characters caught up in the mysterious unfolding of self-knowledge. In this elegant Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, Rebecca Mead introduces the novel that shaped her life and reflects on its joys and its timeless relevance. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators.

George Eliot (b. Mary Ann Evans Cross) was born on November 22, 1819 at Arbury Farm, Warwickshire, England. She received an ordinary education and, upon leaving school at the age of sixteen, embarked on a program of independent study to further her intellectual growth. The death of her father in 1849 left her with a small legacy and the freedom to pursue her literary inclinations. In 1851, she became the assistant editor of the Westminster Review, a position she held for three years. Her first book, Scenes of a Clerical Life (1858), was followed by Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Middlemarch (1872). On May 6, 1880, she married John Cross, a friend of long standing, and after a brief illness she died on December 22 of that year, in London. Rebecca Mead is a staff writer at the New Yorker. She is the author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding and My Life in Middlemarch, a widely acclaimed memoir about how Middlemarch has shaped her life.

"Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." -Virginia Woolf "The most profound, wise and absorbing of English novels . . . and, above all, truthful and forgiving about human behaviour." -Hermione Lee "No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative...I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot...No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully". -V. S. Pritchett "Middlemarch is probably the greatest English novel." -Julian Barnes "It is possible to argue that Middlemarch is the greatest English novel." -A. S. Byatt "Certainly the greatest [English] novel." -Martin Amis