Middlemarch by George Eliot

by Graham Handley

Middlemarch (Palgrave Master Guides) Middlemarch (Palgrave Master Guides)

Genres: Fiction, Classics

109 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1857

About the author

Graham Handley is a retired lecturer and has published widely on nineteenth-century fiction, particularly on George Eliot, Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell. He has edited Wuthering Heights for students.

Reviews

[Mary Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

third time on this one...and still, so many reveals

[John Shugert · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little hard to understand in parts but I see why it is a classic!

[Lisa Harvie]

I couldn’t help but admire the depth of social critique in this novel. Its exploration of ambition, love, and duty is masterful, though the pacing felt slow at times.

[Trevor Kew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whoa, what a slog. Not for the faint-hearted or casual reader, that's for sure. Local politics, marriage entanglements and sentences so unnecessarily complicated they have to be seen to be believed--this is truly a work of its time. And yet, it must be said that certain characters, certain scenes and certain beautifully-written passages still captured my imagination, especially later in the novel once I was more familiar with the town depicted in the novel and its wide variety of inhabitants. This novel was undoubtedly the primary inspiration for JK Rowling's Casual Vacancy, though it is much better than Rowling's rather flawed attempt.