Middlemarch

Middlemarch is George Eliot's novel of provincial English life, bringing several households together around marriage, inheritance, professional ambition and reform. Dorothea Brooke hopes to devote herself to a worthy intellectual purpose, while the young doctor Tertius Lydgate seeks to improve medical practice. Their aspirations encounter self-deception, financial pressures and the imperfect knowledge people have of one another. An expansive narrator moves between individual motives and the social networks that constrain them. The novel's moral force lies in this attention to consequences: ordinary acts of sympathy, generosity and neglect can alter lives far beyond the intentions that first produced them.