With new illustrations and a brilliant original introduction by New
Yorker writer and author of My Life in Middlemarch Rebecca Mead, the
Restless Classics edition of Middlemarch presents George Eliot's
masterpiece of Victorian fiction in an appealing new light.
Long regarded as one of the greatest of the great English-language
novels, Middlemarch by George Eliot has endured as the archetypal
Victorian novel and an eternally resonant exploration of society and the
individual. Centuries removed from the world of the landed gentry in
1830s England, the characters of Middlemarch remain as exquisitely
drawn and deeply alive as any in literature: the pedantic, obsessive
Reverend Casaubon, the idealistic Dr. Lydgate, and the spirited,
striving Dorothea Brooke.
A novel of marriage, Eliot's "study of Provincial Life" is also a
strikingly fresh commentary on scientific and technological change,
cultural and class divides, and the upheavals of a rural community
experiencing global transformation. In her insightful introduction,
Rebecca Mead, New Yorker writer and author of My Year in
Middlemarch, explores Eliot's "meliorism"--her belief that individuals
can improve society in small, everyday ways. Dorothea's successes and
failures not only in love but as an ardent social reformer will resonate
with all of us who look at the world today and ask, as Dorothea did in
her time, "What could she do, what ought she to do?" With bold
illustrations by artist Keren Katz, the Restless Classics edition of
Middlemarch is a thoroughly modern edition of one of the most
important novels ever written.
Praise for Middlemarch
"Middlemarch is so careful to correct any habit to side with one
person rather than another that the narrator even corrects herself."
--John Mullan, author of What Matters in Jane Austen?
"A novel without weaknesses, it renews itself for every generation."
--Martin Amis, author of Inside Story
"Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections,
is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."
--Virginia Woolf
"Middlemarch shows us the contours and indeed the very language of the
characters' inner lives."
--Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the
Making of an American Masterpiece
