"Perhaps the greatest novel of them all... An enormous canvas and a vast and poignant range of character...a marvellous portrait of nineteenth-century provincial life" "Another great romantic story, in which the adorable intellectually pretentious heroine makes a disastrous marriage to a desiccated fossil before finding true love with a penniless somebody" "In Middlemarch George Eliot's serious intelligence produced a novel that no one else could have been capable of - a picture of society as an organic, living, breathing synthesis - order and disorder, hope and hopelessness, pride and humility, charity and greed."
