num_pages: 800
description: Dorothea Brooke can find no acceptable outlet for her talents or energy and few who share her ideals. As an upper middle-class woman in Victorian England she can't learn Greek or Latin simply for herself; she certainly can't become an architect or have a career; and thus, Dorothea finds herself "Saint Theresa of nothing." Believing she will be happy and fulfilled as "the lampholder" for his great scholarly work, she marries the self-centered intellectual Casaubon, twenty-seven years her senior. Dorothea is not the only character caught by the expectations of British society in this huge, sprawling book. Middlemarch stands above its large and varied fictional community, picking up and examining characters like a jeweler observing stones. There is Lydgate, a struggling young doctor in love with the beautiful but unsuitable Rosamond Vincy; Rosamond's gambling brother Fred and his love, the plain-speaking Mary Garth; Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's attractive cousin, and the ever-curious Mrs. Cadwallader. The characters mingle and interact, bowing and turning in an intricate dance of social expectations and desires. Through them George Eliot creates a full, textured picture of life in provincial nineteenth-century England.
language: English
title: Middlemarch
titlecomplete: Middlemarch
characters: Celia Brooke, Nicholas Bulstrode, Arthur Brooke, Will Ladislaw, Mary Garth, Rosamond Vincy, Edward Casaubon, Caleb Garth, Joshua Rigg, John Raffles, Harriet Bulstrode, Tertius Lydgate, Camden Farebrother, Dorothea Brooke, Sir James Chettam, Fred Vincy, Peter Featherstone
genres: Audiobook, Historical Fiction, Novels, Literature, Victorian, Classics, British Literature, Romance, Fiction, 19th Century
ratings_count: 158377
places: England, West Midlands, England, Midlands, England
publisher: Penguin Books